


Triptych

by venndaai



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canonical Character Death, Dalish/Skinner - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Repression, Romantic Soulmates, Seheron (Dragon Age), Slow Burn, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, briefly implied Solavellan, implied Dorian/Alexius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2020-10-11 01:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20537843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Ashkaari has three names on his skin.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I am a huge dork, this fic now has [an official playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2n6AnvGkMgTNuqkpkc0Q0F)

[ ](https://imgur.com/w4j5zIb)

* * *

Imekari was four when he started learning how to read. The Tamas sat them all down in the classroom and drew the syllabograms on the big board in white chalk. Imekari was distracted from the lesson at first, because he was watching the other kids; Nubby was going to start crying soon, because Teeth had bit her, and Shoes was falling asleep…

He still noticed, though, when the Tama at the board drew a very familiar shape. “That’s on my arm,” he said. 

“Yes,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s part of a name. When you see that symbol, it makes the sound _ Vas_.”

She showed him her own arm, the marks around the wrist that said _ A- saar- a _ , Wind, though hers was colored orange against her dark skin, not white like his; and then Nubby started crying, and Imekari thought, _ I was right. _

It was two years later that the marks were fully explained to him. He slept in a different dormitory then, and had a new primary Tama, who called him Ashkaari, because he asked a lot of questions. He was sitting alone with her in the dining hall while the others played outside, because he’d pushed another child while they were playing, determined to win the game, and the child had been hurt, and her gray arm had gone purple and swollen, and Ashkaari had cried almost as much as she had, over it. The girl was given a hug and a kiss and sent to the healer; the boy had been asked if he would like to have tea with Tama inside. He had.

“Your size and strength are deliberate, Ashkaari,” Tama said. “They are tools you have been given, to help you serve the Qun. Vatas knows you didn’t mean to hurt her, and that you won’t do it again. Remember how you helped her with her reading yesterday?” 

He nodded, and they sat together in the quiet, sipping their bowls of tea.

After a while he asked her about the name written on his upper arm. He could read it himself, by then; _ Vasaad_. It sounded like a word, but not one that he knew, which bothered him, because he liked knowing the meanings of words.

“It means secret hunter,” she said, “and it’s a name. The name of someone who will be your kadan one day, Ashkaari. Someone whose purpose will align with yours, who you’ll work with. Someone who’ll need your help, I think, since you’re so good at helping others, little one.”

“Who are they?” Ashkaari asked.

“I don’t know,” Tama said. “There are many people called Vasaad, and yours might not even be called Vasaad yet. They might still be a little imekari like you.” 

That made sense, though it was disappointing. “What about these?” he asked, then, pointing at the mark on his chest and the one that curled around his left eye. 

She hesitated, just a little, before replying, “Yes, those are names of your kadan too.”

“They’re not syllabograms, though, are they?” He was pretty sure they weren’t, though he’d had to take the other kids’ word for it about the one over his eye. 

“No,” she said. “They’re letters. They’re written in one of the _ bas _alphabets.” 

Ashkaari didn’t know what alphabet meant, but he knew what _ bas _meant. He got a weird, sick feeling in his stomach, before Tama caught his chin, looked into his eyes. 

“They must be viddathari,” Tama said. “You’ll have to look after them, Ashkaari, when you meet them. Make sure they flourish under the Qun. They’ll need your help even more.”

“I will,” he said, very earnest. _ Viddathari _was all right, was good, even. Ashkaari liked helping people. But they would be small, he thought, even smaller than Vatas. He would need to be very careful with them. “Tama,” he asked, as something occurred to him, “do you have any markings?”

“No,” she said. “Not everyone does. All of you imekari are my kadan.”

It wasn’t until many years later, looking back on the conversation, that he’d think that maybe she answered a bit too fast. 

He was trained for the Ben-Hassrath. _ Vasaad _was a Ben-Hassrath rank. He never knew exactly how much this influenced his fate.

No one called him Ashkaari, at the training center. He was Learner, and then his class number. The other learners called him ‘Big Dathras’ because of his size and his already pretty impressive horns. It wasn’t meant maliciously, or at least it wasn’t once he showed he could laugh it off. But he still thought of himself as Ashkaari, and he wondered if Tama had ever been to the big city. What she might have thought about the crowds and the huge beehive-shaped buildings and the great port.

Training included learning to read Tevene. There was a still reflection pool at the heart of the training center, used for meditation. Ashkaari copied out the letters around his eye and on his chest onto a slate, carefully reversed them, and memorized the result before wiping the slate clean. It was almost hard to believe both were written in the same script; the letters on his chest were elegant and swooping, while the ones around his eye were careful, blocky print. He tried not to waste too much time wondering about that. He was starting to feel a bit weird about the _ bas _ names. None of the others had given him any grief about it, but if his superiors were watching him more closely, he’d never know, would he? He pictured the letters on the slate and repeated Tama’s words in his head. _ People who’ll need your help. _

He finished his training, and started work. A year of spy rings, smugglers and Tal-Vashoth later, the other Ben-Hassrath started calling him Hissrad. As names went it wasn’t bad. He wondered if there were three people out there with _ Hissrad _written on their bodies in his own neat handwriting.

They sent him to Seheron. For a year he worked as an information-gatherer under the command of a secret-keeper. The secret-keeper was called Moon by the other agents in the office, because of some bad scarring on his face where Tevinter magefire had splashed him once. He was aqun-athlok, and barely came up to Hissrad’s shoulder, and he was quiet, but he impressed Hissrad right from their first meeting. “This is not a good job,” Moon said. “But you’re here because you have the potential to do it well. The work will not be pretty, but it will serve the Qun, and you’ll have us watching your back, even when it feels like the rest of this island hates you.”

Moon’s second in command was called Vasaad, although technically that was just his rank; all the agents called him Silver, for his black hair that was prematurely greying. Hissrad, who had deliberately left a gap in his vitaar when he painted it on that morning, turned to Silver as soon as Moon was far enough away to at least pretend to be out of earshot. “Hey, this is awkward, but uh-” He gestured to his shoulder. 

Silver took a look. “Not my handwriting, sorry,” he said, which Hissrad already knew, because during the pep talk he’d looked at the signatures on the papers on Moon’s desk. But you never knew, so he asked, “And you don’t-”

“Nah. Sorry, kid.”

Which was a great way to start out building respect for himself and his abilities.

It didn’t matter in the end, though. Moon went Tal-Vashoth a year later. Hissrad sent to the Viddasala’s office for orders, but he knew already what the reply was going to be, and had his former boss located two days before the response came back. He didn’t take any of the others with him on the op. Moon hadn’t joined a group, was just by himself, and raving mad when Hissrad broke his neck. It would be nice to tell himself that made it easier.

Hissrad got Moon’s job. 

Silver died in a skirmish at the city gates later that month. 

The replacement Vasaad that Par Vollen sent him wasn’t the right one either, though she was fun enough and played a really mean game of chess. But Seheron got to her, and the Tamassrans sent her home after only eight months of service. 

When the third Vasaad died, Hissrad started spending a lot of time at the docks, looking at the ships heading back to Par Vollen. Thinking about getting on one, or maybe just stepping off the pier. 

But he still hadn’t done either a week later, when a knock on his office door turned into an unfamiliar face, a cheerful new guy with great masses of curling white braids and a smile so bright it was blinding. 

“Hi,” the stranger said. “I’m Vasaad. New guy? Honored to be here, sir, though when I said that to Issallis outside she said, if I remember correctly, uh, _ damn, I’d like to see the boss’s face when you tell him that! _ But I said it anyway, so you can draw your own conclusions about my intelligence there.”

“You got a nickname?” Hissrad asked.

Vasaad laughed. “Not one I liked.” He had a great laugh. Rich and full and untroubled. Made you want to laugh with him.

“Fair enough,” Hissrad said. “Pleasure to meet you. Everyone calls me Hissrad.”

He was watching closely, but even if he hadn’t been, he’d have caught the widened eyes, the indrawn breath. He hoped this guy was better at keeping a straight face out in the field. “Hissrad,” Vasaad repeated, and his hand went up to this neck, where, ah yes, the idiot had painted his vitaar in swirls that framed syllabograms drawn in a familiar hand. “Is this your-” 

Hissrad cut him off. “Your office is next door. Your food and bath tokens are on the desk. We don’t get started too early in the morning here, unless we’re out on rounds, which happens once a month. Your predecessor left tidy files, but the system’s a bit complicated; I’ll be spending an hour each morning going over things with you for the rest of this week.”

“Right,” Vasaad said. “Er-” 

“How about a tour of the city?” Hissrad said. “I can show you all the good food sellers. They’ve got this thing here, cooked fish wrapped in flatbread- you’ll like it, it’s great. And you can meet some of our informants. It’s important to put names to faces as soon as possible.”

Vasaad studied him for a long moment. Then he smiled again, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “Sounds good,” he said. “Hey, what’s your policy on jokes?”

“I like them,” Hissrad said. “If they’re good.” 

“Oh, all of mine are great,” Vasaad said.

He told one to Hissrad and Issallis and Mashev, as they ate fishwraps sitting on the pier. “So one Ben-Hassrath is laughing her head off, and another Ben-Hassrath says to her, ‘What’s so funny?’ ‘I just heard the best joke in the world,’ the first one says. ‘OK, tell me!’ ‘I can’t, I just sent someone to the reeducators for telling it.’”

“Oh, I think I know why you got sent here,” Tallis said, grinning. 

“You’ll fit right in,” Mashev said. “You heard any Seheron jokes yet?”

“Can’t say I have,” Vasaad said, and took a big bite of his wrap.

“So in Seheron there’s this young Ben-Hassrath who’s Viddathari, and he’d lived a terrible life before he found the Qun. One day his superior finds him rummaging around in the trash like a qalaba, looking for scraps. ‘Didn’t you learn in the Viddathlok?’ his superior tells him. ‘Everyone’s equal under the Qun. You’ll eat the commissary food with the rest of us, and not go looking for better!’”

Issallis groaned. Hissrad just mentally counted them all lucky Mashev hadn’t told one of the gory ones. 

“Is the food really that bad?” Vasaad asked.

“Why do you think we bought dinner from a Viddathari?” Hissrad asked. He almost slapped Vasaad on the shoulder. Stopped himself just in time. “Nah, it’s not so bad in the summer. Supply lines go to hell in the winter, though. The bakers have to get creative with their ingredients.”

“Fun,” Vasaad said.

“I like you, kid,” Mashev announced. “I’m going to bet a pint of maraas-lok on you lasting the year.”

“If you don’t stop talking about that shit where I can hear you, asshole,” Hissrad growled, “I’m actually going to have to discipline you, and it won’t be pretty.”

“Yes, Tama,” Mashev grumbled. 

Hissrad looked out at the ocean, at the deceptively calm blue-green expanse, the sun turning it orange as it got lower. He breathed in and out. He wanted to bite Mashev’s head off, but he had at least enough sense to know that what he was feeling didn’t really have much to do with the backtalk at all. 

If he turned his head, Vasaad would be there. Looking back at him. Those bright clever eyes.

“Let’s head back,” Hissrad said.

Vasaad went a whole two months before he brought it up again. They were on stakeout, watching the south road at midnight for a suspected Vint message drop. 

“You were right,” Vasaad said. “These wrap things are delicious.”

“Don’t chew so loudly,” Hissrad grumbled. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Vasaad said. “Hey, listen. How come you keep avoiding touching me?”

His eyes glittered with moonlight. 

“My name’s on there somewhere, isn’t it,” Vasaad said, into Hissrad’s silence, “under all that vitaar and rippling muscle. What are you scared of?”

“You know how long life expectancy is on this island?” Hissrad said. “You know how long your predecessors averaged?”

“...Yeah,” Vasaad said, giving him a look that Hissrad could make out perfectly even in the dark. In fairness it had been a stupid question. Vasaad was good at his purpose. He did his research. “So?”

“So best case scenario, you go home in twenty months and we never see each other again.” 

“You’ve been here longer than that,” Vasaad pointed out. “A _ lot _longer. I bet you’ll crack first. Or we’ll crack together, and get some nice vacation time in the Viddathlok before they give us new jobs.” 

Hissrad grunted. No point trying to convince Vasaad of the truth Hissrad had figured out a while ago, which was that he, Hissrad, was going to die on Seheron. “Either way,” he said. “You really want to get attached?”

Vasaad shrugged. “Other people do,” he said. “Soldiers in the Beresaad during invasions. Tamassrans and their patients who aren’t going to get better. You and me, we’re alive right now. Why shouldn’t we make the most of it?”

His words echoed what the priests said, the recitations during the meditations. It was right, Hissrad knew that. But still, when Vasaad extended a tentative hand, Hissrad couldn’t move to take it. 

“Okay,” Vasaad said. He didn’t even sound upset. “How about a deal? Two year anniversary swings around and I’m still here, you give me a handshake.” He put on an expression that was somehow both pleading and teasing. “Please?” 

_ How could I deny you anything? _ Hissrad thought, a pain in his chest, but all he said was, “Alright.”

They didn’t make it through the whole two years, of course. An ambush on the road between Alam and Marak, opportunistic Fog Warriors taking their chances. Two guys with knives and one with an ugly fucking waraxe. Hissrad put himself between them and Vasaad. He might not be a Sten, but he was still built to take the hits; Vasaad was made for stealing secrets with smiles and quick fingers.

The Bull’s sword ran one of the knife-fighters through. The axe came from the side, knocking the sword from his hands with such force the Bull’s whole body vibrated with it. That let the other guy get a knife in Bull’s ribs. The blade sank in deep, but the assholes still hadn’t learned that Qunari fighters were the most dangerous when wounded. His sword was on the ground, but the rush of dragonblood strength let Hissrad snap the human like a twig with his bare hands. Axe man was winding up for another blow. Hissrad shoved the body at him, watched him fall. Vasaad was there now with a knife for the bas’s throat.

“Shit,” Vasaad breathed. Hissrad knelt to pick up his sword. Couldn’t, his hands too slippery with blood and a throbbing pain that was strangely disconnected from the rest of him. Couldn’t stand up again, either. “Shit, your fingers-” Vasaad caught Hissrad’s hand. 

The general pain was so bad it almost distracted Hissrad from the sudden stinging in his shoulder, but it didn’t stop him seeing Vasaad spasm like someone was choking him. Didn’t stop him seeing his own name fill with blood-colored red, where Vasaad was still leaving it exposed around his neck like a collar, one symbol on each side connected by lines of vitaar. Red against white. Vasaad dropped Hissrad’s hand, but he was still covered in Hissrad’s blood. 

“Bandages in my pack,” Hissrad managed to grunt, and Vasaad nodded, still holding it together- Hissrad was proud of him. Even more proud when he dressed the wounds like a professional, ignoring the sounds of pain Hissrad couldn’t entirely bite back. Especially because Hissrad could feel Vasaad’s tension, like a twanged cord vibrating between them.

(He hadn’t known it would be like this. That he’d feel like two people at once, his usual body, throbbing with battle-rage and pain, and someone else too, smaller and wound tight like a wire. He hadn’t known.)

Once the task of dressing the wounds was done, though, and Hissrad wasn’t losing blood at really bad rates any more, Vasaad’s gaze dropped to the ground, to the bodies on it. Just bits of meat, to Hissrad, but not to Vasaad, not yet. Somewhere on the ground were two of Hissrad’s fingers, too, and that did get to him, made him start to feel sick and dizzy, so he sank down into the lessons they’d given him in Par Vollen. The body is only a tool. And you do what you can with the tools you’re given. 

“Shit,” Vasaad said again. “You didn’t even hesitate, you just-”

“They were bad guys,” Hissrad said. “You can’t hesitate. Wait til winter. The ‘vints try their luck every year, and it’s all hands to the mill when they land, Ben-Hassrath and Antaam alike. You’ll get used to blood and guts.”

“That’s not what I’m- you saved my life,” Vasaad said. “You-” For once he was having trouble with words. Hissrad blinked at him. The red writing on his neck looked like blood. Hissrad could feel the phantom ghost of pain on his own neck, an invisible copy of that writing.

Hissrad shook himself. “We need to get out of the open,” he said.

Sleeping in the jungle was dangerous as shit, but Hissrad wasn’t up to walking all the way to the village, and there might well be more insurgents waiting for them there, so they got off the road as far as they could, and found a cave that didn’t have anything big already living in it. Vasaad fussed over Hissrad. “Calm down, kadan, I’ll live,” Hissrad said. 

“I know,” Vasaad said, but he took Hissrad’s unharmed hand and squeezed it, tightly. The sensation of touch doubled, rippled. “Don’t do that again. I can defend myself. I got combat training too.” 

Hissrad snorted. “The stuff they teach you in Qunandar isn’t worth much out here.”

“Well, whatever I’m missing, I’ll learn.” He wasn’t budging on this, it was obvious. 

“Hey,” Hissrad said, “wash the vitaar off my shoulder.” 

Vasaad hesitated, but then he did it, touch careful, gentle. It hurt when Hissrad twisted his head to look, but it was worth it, seeing Vasaad’s name drawn on his skin in the pink of a Seheron sunrise. 

The anniversary came by and Vasaad was still there. Another year, and another, and he didn’t fall, or crack, though his brilliant smile got a little wilder, a little hollow. Hissrad probably changed, too. Hard to tell from the inside. Hard to tell when the days blended together, death and fog and rage and the lies, always so many lies, lying to everyone, especially the tamassrans. But not Vasaad. A little oasis of truth in the lies, tea with Vasaad in the quiet early morning. Going to sleep each night, closing his eyes and feeling someone else settling down too, hearing quiet breathing in his ears even when they were on opposite sides of the island. It helped.

The poison, though. The dead kids. He felt himself crack. Should have turned himself in right then. Let Vasaad win the bet. But madness didn’t care about shoulds. And none of his people questioned it, because it got them too, the ones that were still alive, that hadn’t died from the poison. (Mashev had taken seven hours to die, and in the black behind his eyelids Hissrad could see him still, curled up in agony, a blink away from the small bodies laid out on the steps of the school.) Kostari didn’t get the rage as bad, and Gatt was always pissed at everything, but Vasaad’s anger was an unexpected inferno. Hissrad should have diffused it, somehow, found some way, but he was too busy warming himself by that blaze. Vasaad’s anger was so pure and strong, so reassuring when Hissrad was cracking into tiny bits. 

Hissrad led them to the stronghold, through a world all hazy red, blood pounding in his ears. “I’m taking point,” Vasaad said, snarling, transformed into something beautiful and monstrous. He wasn’t in any shape for it. Hissrad should have held him back. Should have taken the hits, filled the role he was good for. 

Instead, several feet behind, in the shadow of old stone pillars, he got a great view of the Tal-Vashoth arrow burying itself in Vasaad’s stupidly unprotected throat, as Hissrad’s shoulder flared with agony. 

It must have been fast. That was the only consolation he could allow himself. No more than a few seconds could have passed between Vasaad hitting the floor and the searing pain of the mark fading to an ache.

Emptiness in a part of his mind that had grown used to being full.

Hissrad went completely mad, then. Exactly the way he’d seen so many Tal-Vashoth, when he’d cut down their kadan in front of them. He was no better than them, and he never had been.

He didn’t even see Kostari and Mertam and Asaaranda go down. 

When all the Tal-Vashoth were dead, and their bodies in a satisfactory number of pieces, Hissrad sat among the blood and gore and thought about tearing himself apart too. The axe he’d been wielding til it shattered wouldn’t be any good for it, even if it was still in one piece, he’d never get a good enough angle, but Vasaad’s knife was still in his cold stiff fingers, incongrously clean- he’d never gotten a chance to use it. Hissrad could do a quick job with that. 

He got as far as prying the knife out of Vasaad’s grip before he started having second thoughts. He could still kind of see the letters on his chest, through the blood. 

_ People who need your help_. 

Maybe they’d be the names of his fellow laborers at the qamek farm. He still owed it to them to let the reeducators take a shot at making him into something useful. 

Existence is a choice.

The color of the sky had changed when he became aware of someone calling his name.

“Hissrad,” Gatt said. 

The kid. Seventeen. Tiny. Tears in his eyes. For once not looking pissed, just… lost. 

Alive. It didn’t seem real. 

“You took them all out,” Gatt said. “And then you didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t get you to move, so I went back to headquarters and got help.”

It took effort to look up, past Gatt’s tiny silhouette, and see the shapes behind him. Medics, he identified by their tassels. Guards, with big shoulder plate and bigger swords. 

“Reeducators,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “Get… reeducators. I submit to the Qun.”


	2. Chapter 2

His first year outside the Qun wasn’t easy. The Iron Bull was a construction that took time to build. He’d thought he was prepared, from all the hours spent observing the viddathari in Seheron, practicing imitating their turns of phrase, their facial expressions, their weird ways of talking about sex and rank and religion, but Rivain wasn’t Seheron. Nevarra was even less Seheron. He stayed quiet, watched and listened and learned.

Tried not to pick at the gaps inside of him, the holes, the jagged bits sanded smooth in the viddathlok.

It worked out, because he could get by just being the silent dumb muscle, the big scary Tal-Vashoth. Nobody cared to ask questions of that guy, but they didn’t volunteer information either, so he eventually he started the process of creating a new self. He started chatting with his fellow mercenaries, who were inclined to respect him when he took hits for them on the battlefield. He started chatting with innkeepers and barmaids, who liked it when he tipped generously, once he’d figured out how money worked. He didn’t bother covering up the burned-black name on his arm. To the _ bas _the syllabograms were just more patterns in the vitaar. He had to start taking the vitaar off when he started having sex regularly, but doing it in the dark solved that problem.

Later, he started collecting tattoos. 

The years went by, in a quiet haze of blood and new experiences, trickling into the emptiness inside of him. New kinds of food, new kinds of drink. No limits on either, beyond his purse. He made bad financial decisions, and slept in a barn for a week. He learned better. He listened, sent back reports. One year turned into two, turned into three and then four.

What kind of sucked the most was the loss of authority. There were a lot of problems around him that could be fixed in a moment by Hissrad, if Hissrad had the Ben-Hassrath backing him up. But in Nevarra, he was on his own. Which was how it had to be, because he wasn’t trustworthy enough to handle the hard problems any more.

"Your purpose will be simple and clear," Kasaan had said to him, on the steps of the temple. He knew she was Ben-Hassrath, like him, but she had the calm and self assurance of a Tamassran, and she had showed him the path of sanity, so he found himself thinking of her as his teacher. "The bas will pay you to fight. Soldiers, beasts, dangerous things."

"No civilians," he'd said. "No tough calls." 

"No," she said, a hand on his arm. At first he'd been afraid- or maybe just ashamed- to let her see how tired he was of the things he had done for the Qun. But at the end, there was no fear left. "You served well. It will be easier now."

It was. No doubt about that. 

But the children starving on the streets, the rabid scum he often had to fight alongside when he should have been putting them down… it ground on him.

Which might be why, when he saw a group of Tevinter bounty hunters beating up some kid in a tavern, he waded in like an idiot. 

He shouldn’t have been in Tevinter, really, but he was following an interesting trail of rumor, and someone knew something in the next village over, and here in the border land there wasn’t much difference between Nevarra and the Imperium, everyone speaking Common and Tevene interchangeably, the same food and clothes and turns of phrase. ‘The next village over’ wasn’t big enough to attract the Imperium’s notice except during tax time, and the Bull avoided the major roads on his way in. He headed to the tavern first, ordered a mug of weak beer and settled in to chat up the bartender, body angled to keep the door in his field of vision.

So he saw when the bounty hunters came in, and he saw the quiet guy in the corner tense up, and he knew what was about to happen, and if it had only been the usual couple of punches to soften up a target before dragging them off to the nearest Imperial outpost, maybe the Bull wouldn’t have interfered. 

But violence was the language he’d learned third and learned deepest, and it only took maybe twenty seconds to see that this wasn’t a softening up, and it wasn’t a clean execution either. They had their target on the ground, and they were pulling off their shirt. The biggest guy took out a flail. Wicked-looking thing. There was going to be a dead body at the end of this, but maybe not for a while. 

“Please,” the victim said, muffled against the floor. “Please.”

“Hey,” the Bull said, stepping away from the bar. 

The flail hit flesh. There was a scream. The Bull thought, _ fuck this. _

“Hey,” the Bull said again, louder, and grabbed the big guy’s shoulder.

Afterward there was a lot of blood everywhere. The haze of red receded, from one side of his vision anyway, and he could see the inn had emptied, except for the dead bodies and the Bull’s new friend, who had held up their end of the fight pretty well, considering. The Bull found a chair that wasn’t broken, and sat down carefully, each breath a new jolt of pain in the general cacophony. 

“You’re safe now, but I’d say we’ve got ten minutes before the guard gets brave enough to come in here,” he remarked to the kid, who was looking for something behind the bar. He hoped the kid understood him. He’d repeat himself in Tevene if he had to, but he preferred not to reveal how many languages he knew. “There’s a back door, though. We can sneak out.”

The kid came back with a jug of water and a dish towel. “We need to clean this shit up and stop you bleeding,” he said, in fluent though strongly accented Common. No, wait, not he, she, probably. She’d fought like a soldier, but with bas it was all about the tits, right? He was distracted. Oh yeah, blood loss. 

“Sure,” the Bull said. “Hey, what do you want me to call you, kid?”

The kid patted gently at the Bull’s eye socket, soaking the towel with red. “Cremisius Aclassi,” they said, and okay, that was a male name. The Bull didn’t know everything there was to know about Vint names, but he knew a bit about that one, all right. “Had a rank, but not any-” His words cut off. The Bull could guess why.

“What color?” he asked. 

“Orange,” Cremisius said. “Fuck me. Are you Iron Bull?”

“_The _ Iron Bull,” the Bull said. "The article is important.” He was slurring the words a little. Blood loss could be annoying. 

Kid rolled his eyes. “Shit. Always thought maybe you’d turn out to be a prostitute.”

Not that far off the mark. He’d exchanged sex for various things, here in the past year and even a few times on Seheron. “I’m a mercenary,” he said. “With Fisher’s Bleeders. We work out of Nevarra, most of the time.”

“You’re an idiot, is what you are,” Cremisius said. “This is bad. You’re going to need to see a healer.” He folded the cloth into a tight square, pressed it against the Bull’s face. More pain, aaaargh. “Hold it there. Huh, you lose those fingers in stupid bar fights too?” 

“Something like that,” the Bull said. “Time to go.”

He stumbled over a chair and banged into the doorframe, and tried to tell himself it was the dizziness and not the way his vision was flat now, with weird black spots. He’d trained to move and fight with only one eye. He’d trained to do it with no eyes. But that was always temporary, not the rest of his life. 

He closed the unharmed eye, briefly, and tried to focus; and knew, without seeing, where Cremisius was, behind him. Could hear, like an echo, the way the blood was pounding in the human’s ears, slightly faster than in his own.

It didn’t feel exactly like it had before, but it was like something had poked at a barely scabbed over wound. Or like something he’d thought dead had come painfully back to life. 

They made it to a private room at the inn across the invisible border. The Bull wasn’t worried much about follow up trouble. The local guard weren’t going to kick up too much of a fuss over dead Tevinter soldiers, and Fisher didn’t give a crap what his men did when they weren’t on the job, as long as it didn’t cause him any inconvenience. Fisher was kind of shit that way. 

The Bull paid for a healer who took a look under the dishcloth and sighed. “There’s no saving that,” she said. “And cleaning it's going to hurt.” She hesitated a moment, and he recognized the mental calculation- odds of anyone believing a Tal-Vashoth drifter who tried to report an apostate- so he wasn’t surprised when she then waggled her fingers; he just struggled to track the motion with his monocular vision. “You alright with me putting you under? Promise not to rob you if you don’t tell me off to the templars.”

He wasn’t alright with it, not really, but staying conscious wasn’t a good option- pain could make a joke out of even the best self-control, and he wasn’t going to let himself hurt this woman who was only trying to help him. “Sure,” he said. “Krem can watch.”

“Who’s Krem?” the kid asked.

“Cremisius is way too much of a mouthful,” the Bull told him. 

“Same number of syllables as _ the Iron Bull_,” Krem said. He was mouthy. It was fun. _ You like us mouthy ones, because then the civilians laugh and you don’t have to come up with jokes yourself, _ Vasaad would say. Except he wouldn’t, because he was dead. 

Maybe the Iron Bull should tell jokes. Nothing too advanced, or too memorable. Just stupid enough to put people at their ease. Puns, maybe. It’d be good practice for his Common, too. 

“You won’t let her cast dark magics on me or steal my trousers, will you, Krem?” the Bull asked. 

“Your trousers are safe,” the kid said. There was an edge in his voice, but he settled down on the little bed in the watchful pose of a really high quality guard. The Bull didn’t think he was about to break. 

If the Bull was wrong, well. _ Asit tal-eb. _

“Good lad.”

Krem made some kind of a sound- a strangled laugh or sob- but there was no time to interpret, because the _ bas-sa _ \- the _ healer _was reaching out and the darkness was swirling up.

He had a weird dream. Put it down to _ bas _magic fuckery. Didn’t mean the meditation techniques were failing him. 

Woke up and the healer was gone. Just a small room in the back of some Nevarran inn, wind rustling the trees outside the little window. An eye gone. Someone’s legs pressed against his back. The ‘Vint, arms wrapped around his knees, dozing sitting up, the light doze of the soldier in enemy territory. Sword hilt near his hand. The Bull could feel the vibration of something strange down their connection; a human dream, maybe.

The Bull coughed quietly. The ‘Vint’s eyes snapped open. His hand went to the sword, then dropped. 

“You let that healer look at your back?” the Bull asked. 

Krem flushed. “No,” he said, a little defiantly. 

“Mmm,” the Bull said. “You gonna let me look at it?”

He made sure to maintain eye contact as Krem considered him. His left eye kept wanting to blink- the muscles, the eyelid felt like they were intact, but there was a heavy bandage preventing any movement.

“If you can sit up without fainting,” Krem said. 

Challenge accepted! He sat up. It took longer and involved more groaning than he was happy with, but verticality was achieved. 

“Maker’s balls, you’re tough,” Krem said, reluctant admiration creeping into his tone. “But don’t strain yourself.” He stood, walked across the room, returned with a bowl of water and a clean roll of bandages. He moved stiffly, and the Bull hoped that was just due to the cut on his shoulders. Once back on the bed, Krem shrugged out of his shirt, in jerky motions that could be the result of discomfort physical or otherwise. The Bull noted the tears in the fabric had been repaired with neat straight stitches of thick thread. 

To the Bull’s relief, the cut wasn’t that bad. It did go right down the center of the writing on the kid’s back, though.

The gray, colorless writing.

For a moment he considered lying, or even just not saying anything. But that’d backfire eventually, if they stayed in each other’s company for long. 

“Is it-” Krem started to ask.

“It’s my writing, yeah,” the Bull said. “But it’s not filled in.”

“Oh,” Krem said, and he sounded completely at a loss. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” the Bull lied. He was pretty sure he did know. The writing that crawled across the kid’s tan skin was in Common, the letters printed in the big, uncertain hand of a poorly-educated mercenary. Someone who only picked up a pen to sign for his share of the take from Fisher after every operation.

It was the name of a person who didn’t really exist.

“Ah, who cares,” Krem said. “So it’s weird. You’re a Qunari. This is already weird.” 

“All right,” the Bull said. He reached for the roll of bandages, missed, his fingers sliding by it. _ Vashedan_. Third try he got it. “Are you getting anything from me? Like, feeling sore in the places I got banged up, or seeing double? Well, I guess it’d actually be more like seeing one and a half, right?”

There was a pause while Krem thought about it. The Bull tore off a strip of bandage, dipped it in the water. “Maybe?” Krem said at last. “I think- it kind of feels like you’ve got a hand on my shoulder, even when you don’t.” Another pause. “Oh. World’s foggy with my left eye closed. Is that- do you think it’ll stay like that?”

“Nah, it’ll clear up.” Vasaad’s fingers had tingled after Hissrad had lost his, but the sensation had only lingered a few hours. The Bull started to clean the long, shallow cut. The muscles under his hands tensed, but the ‘Vint didn’t make any sound. “You’re a pretty tough guy yourself.”

Krem did make a sound then. Something between a cough and- something else. “Are you mocking me,” he asked, quietly.

“No?” the Bull said, and he must have sounded genuinely puzzled enough to convince, because Krem sighed, and relaxed a little, almost leaning into the Bull’s touch. 

“This is awkward,” Krem said, after a while, “but I’d like to know- I’d like to know what you expect from me.”

“Hey, you don’t owe me anything,” the Bull said. “I love a good fight, especially when I get to break a few ‘Vint heads. No offense.”

“You lost your eye,” Krem said.

“And I’m going to look _ so badass _with an eyepatch, just wait.”

The back muscles tensed again, but this time because Krem was laughing. The hesitant laugh of someone who hadn’t expected to. Someone who’d had no reason to laugh for a while.

“I can’t believe you,” he said. 

“Yeah, I’m something,” the Bull said. He held one end of the bandage roll to Krem’s shoulder with his left hand, and passed the roll around so Krem could settle it across his chest himself. Their fingers brushed, when Krem took the roll from him. 

“I owe you,” Krem said. “But I won’t- I won’t be your wife.”

The Bull was going to have to do something about that sense of debt. Frustrating _ bas _ thing; under the Qun Krem would have understood that the Bull was made to bleed for others, that the debt was only the debt all parts owed to the whole. Krem _ should _be under the Qun; he’d be free of that tangled up knot about his gender, he’d be free from assholes attacking him in taverns-

_ he’d been drinking too much, laughing at one of Vasaad’s dumb jokes, thinking they were off duty, like an idiot, because there was no such thing as off duty, not for anyone on Seheron, and of course that was when the pretty barmaid pulled out a knife- _

“I was thinking lieutenant, actually,” the Bull said. He accepted the roll of bandages back, pulled it tight to wrap another circuit around and around. “That’s what you were back in the army, right?”

Pause. “I was going to be,” Krem said, after a moment. “Hadn’t got the promotion yet when I ran- was still just a decurion.”

“I guess ‘Vints can recognize talent after all. The job’s yours if you want it. Or we both walk out of here tomorrow and head in different directions, no hard feelings.”

Krem craned his head over his shoulder. “You’ve got your own company?”

“Well,” the Bull said. “Not yet.” He grinned. “Been waiting til I found a decent second.”

Krem shook his head. “You’re one crazy bastard. All right then. Might as well try mercenary life. I hear it pays better than tailoring.” 

“Unless you’re personal tailor to the King, sure.” 

One final wrap around, and the gray lettering was completely covered up.

Probably for the best. 

That evening he sat down and pulled out his little nugskin-bound notebook. Turned to a blank page at the back, stared at it for a moment before writing _ The Iron Bull _, exactly as he’d signed his last tax payment to the Pentaghast king’s treasury. Three words, every stroke big and clumsy and hesitant. A copy of the lines on Krem’s back. 

Beneath it he wrote _ Hissrad _, the way he remembered it around Vasaad’s neck. The way he signed his reports. Two boxes sitting next to each other, each one divided into a different number of sections by precise geometric lines of ink. He’d struggled with his handwriting as a child, with hands already too big for a child’s stylus, until Tama had smiled and rested his hand on top of hers, let him feel the movements of her muscles as she wrote out from memory the first line of the Book of Koslun. 

He blew on the ink to dry it, and then, under that, he drew the first symbols he could ever remember learning. The circles and dots that were the digits in the string of numbers that attached him to a file in the Viddasala’s office. 

Looked at the three names, lined up one on top of the other, all neat.

Then, once the ink was dry, he turned the pages back, to where he’d last had the notebook open, and added a few lines to his monthly report. It’d be stupid not to mention the incident at all. He knew he was being watched, and the names on his skin were certainly written down in his file. He deliberated a bit, and then wrote down the bare dry facts. _ Recruited a Tevinter deserter, Cremisius Aclassi, as potential second. Lost eye in fight. Will challenge Fisher as soon as confident with fighting abilities again. Own mercenary company affords more mobility. _

For almost a year now, he’d received no guidance more personal than instructions to watch a particular person, deliver a particular package. No warnings that he’d gotten too deep into the role, that all the food and sex was corrupting him. He’d been turned loose.

He traced the curve of his empty eye socket with a fingertip, brushing the skin where he knew the letters were. 

Maybe a _ bas _ could be _ kadan _, out here. Weirder things had happened. To him, even.

“What are you writing?” Krem asked, from the floor where he was setting up the bedroll he’d acquired. 

“Letter home,” the Bull said, after only hesitating a moment. Pretty sure it was just a moment.

“Where’s home for you, then?” Krem asked. “From that accent I’d say Orzammar, but you’re a bit taller than I hear they make them down there.” 

His language tutor in Qunandar had been a viddathari dwarf, and the Bull had never been anywhere near as good at adopting accents as he was at identifying them on others. It wasn’t really a problem by itself; large communities of surface dwarves had spread their drawn out pronunciation all over Thedas.

The lies rose up in his throat._ Free Marches. Mother and brother live in Tantervale. I send them money, when I can. Hard to earn an honest living when you’re a gray horned giant, if you’re not cut out for the mercenary life. _ Little bits tossed in to earn Krem’s sympathy, help him recognize the Iron Bull as someone just like him.

Instead he said, “Par Vollen.”

“Ah,” Krem said. “I thought you Tal-Vashoth were cut off for good?”

“Never said I was Tal-Vashoth,” the Iron Bull said. 

“Oh,” Krem said. “Right.” 

And apparently that was it. He asked no more questions, just walked around the room organizing things with all the careful precision of a Ben-Hassrath clerk. Comforting routine, the Bull thought.

“What about you?” he asked. “Where’s home?”

“Vyrantium,” Krem said. “Once. Now… wherever I end up, I suppose.” 

Vyrantium. The Bull’s never been there. He knows a bit about it: Port city. Exports fancy cloth, imports slaves. Not Qarinus. No recent history with the Beresaad. Good. 

He stopped himself there. Didn’t think about how things could have shaken out, if the timing had been different. If Decurion Aclassi’s legion had been sent across the ocean one of the winters Hissrad was still watching over Alam, if the writing on his eye might have been awakened by a desperate hand-to-hand fight on a bloodsoaked beach, or if Vasaad would have cut the throat of a luckless enemy soldier in some alley during the stretched-out hell of urban fighting without Hissrad ever touching the guy, if Vasaad would have told him later that the writing had burned black.

It hadn’t happened like that. Life still had at least one small mercy to offer. More than one; Cremisius Aclassi was just a soldier, a decent, ordinary guy, not the monster Ashkaari had secretly feared, the shadowy slave-owning magister who thought the world belonged to them. Having Krem’s name on his skin just meant the Bull worked well with karasaad, whether they were Qunari or _ bas_. Nothing more complicated than that. 

He went ten years without really having to think about it again.

“Dorian of House Pavus, most recently of Minrathous. How do you do?”

All the Bull could think was, _ Oh, crap. _


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bull meets his third soulmate, avoids thinking about a lot of things, experiences some high stress situations, and has a conversation with Krem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this got away from me and is definitely going to be longer than originally planned, sorry. I just love this guy so much, I guess.

Here was the thing. He’d had the name, and fourteen years tromping around _ bas _ lands where he could have done something with it. Asked around, about _ Pavus_. Learned some things. 

He never had. 

“I know it’s an altus house,” Krem had said, the first time he saw the writing over the Bull’s heart. Most people never saw it, because the Bull kept it covered by vitaar. That was purely practical; it was a vulnerable spot. But the vitaar was toxic to the squishy short people, so the Bull washed it off before getting frisky with anyone, and before snuggling up with his lieutenant so they didn’t freeze to death tracking a murderer who’d fled into the mountains of the Emprise. “Don’t know any more than that, though. No salacious gossip that trickled down to the legions, anyway.”

“No worries,” the Bull had said, because Krem genuinely had looked worried, or rather, regretful. Like he wished he could bring the Bull information about whoever had written that fancy signature.

Somewhere in his head or heart the Bull had known. Those flourishing letters didn’t belong to anyone who could ever fit into the Qun. But it sure was something to be confronted by the physical reality of it; to stand in front of someone so beautiful and sharp and toweringly arrogant. 

Just because _ he _hadn’t done the research didn’t mean the Ben-Hassrath hadn’t, though.

So there the Iron Bull was, standing kind of flabbergasted in the dark chantry, demon guts all around. The boss seemed charmed. The Bull couldn’t blame Lavellan. Pavus was charming, in an annoying ‘Vint asshole way. 

“This is Sera,” the boss said, making introductions, “Enchanter Vivienne, the Iron Bull.”

No flicker of recognition on that pretty face, just a wary glance up and down, the old _ fuck that’s one big ugly Qunari. _“Charmed,” Pavus said. 

_ Say something, _ the Bull thought to himself, _ come on, say something, _ but all he could manage was a grunt. Saw Pavus put him down as Big _ Dumb _ Ugly Qunari. He was _ better _than this, he really was.

But not long after that, the Bull watched ‘Vint asshole-in-chief Alexius do something with magic that made the boss and Pavus- vanish. 

The Bull growled, and lifted his axe. Part of his brain was running the numbers on how this fight was going to go- the Inquisition had the numerical advantage, but the Venatori had more mages, unless Fiona decided to join the right side. Another part was listening to Sera’s screams of rage, and Vivienne’s barked orders. A third was composing his next report-_ sorry, guys, I lost the Herald. Looks like you’ll need to send in the Beresaad after all. Any chance we could just kill the demons and leave off the whole conversion part? _

_ I also lost this guy named Dorian Pavus. You probably know more about him than I do. Guess I’ll never figure out what he might have needed from me, though maybe that’s for the best. Didn’t seem like we would have gotten along. _

Then another hole in the world opened up and spat out a human and an elf, looking only a little worse for wear. 

“Glad you made it back, boss,” the Bull said, when the excitement had died down. 

“Very glad to be back,” the Herald said, and smiled an earnest smile at him, but there was something hidden there. Something in the way the Herald and Pavus now seemed more familiar with each other. 

Maybe there was a conversation the Bull didn’t get to hear, or maybe there wasn’t, but when they finally headed back to Skyhold, herding three hundred mages with them, Pavus tagged along. His purpose in the convoy seemed to be keeping the Herald entertained with conversation, which was useful enough. The Bull stayed out of their way, hanging back near the end of the convoy to watch their tail with the rearguard. That put him well out of the way of the mages, too. It itched, not keeping an eye on them, but a hulking Qunari would only make them more skittish, he wasn’t too stupid to work that one out. 

He wondered how skittish Pavus was, about Qunari. Wondered what the Herald might be telling him, about the Iron Bull. He thought he’d been doing okay there, but he’d been taking the soft, slow approach, letting the boss come to him. Hadn’t hurried to ingratiate himself, like Pavus seemed to have done.

It was a long week up into the mountains. Some of the mages were kids. Some were old. 

Sometimes the Bull had to close his eye for a while until the snow stopped looking like Seheron sand. Let himself think about Krem instead, let himself feel what Krem was doing, the stretch of muscles during exercise or the warmth of a fire or the hoarse throat of shouted orders.

Back in Haven he went straight to the Chargers’ camp, breathed a sigh of relief when he found Krem rewrapping the handle of his maul by the big firepit.

“Back already, Chief?” Krem asked. Next to him, Rocky snorted.

“Don’t listen to him, Chief,” the dwarf said. “He was watching you folk wind your way up the mountain for, must have been an hour.”

“Aw, I’m touched,” the Bull said. “Why didn’t you meet me at the gate?”

“I was just watching to see if you’d roll off the mountainside,” Krem said. “How was your trip? Collected those mages?”

“Yeah, the Boss pulled it off,” the Bull said. “Want to grab a drink?”

“If you’re paying,” Krem said. 

The Singing Maiden was a good tavern. The Bull liked Southern taverns. It was good to be somewhere warm, with drinks and laughter and music, while snow drifted past outside. Flissa was good at keeping the atmosphere warm. The Bull had flirted with her once, but it had quickly become obvious she was only interested in other humans. To each their own. She sold pretty good beer.

The corner the Bull was starting to think of as his usual was free, and they settled there, both facing the door, Krem guarding the Bull’s blind side, like always. The Bull breathed in the smells of smoke and beer and sweat. Took a swig from his mug and held it in his mouth a while before swallowing. 

Krem made a face. “Do you have to drink that piss?”

“It’s an acquired taste,” Bull said. “I gotta drink more, so you’ll acquire it.”

“Better than that Qunari poison you were chugging after the wyvern, I suppose.”

“Aw, does the ‘Vint want some fancy northern wines to go with his delicate palate?”

The banter felt good. Normal.

When the Herald approached, it was from the Bull’s good side, which he appreciated. Lavellan was always careful to do that, and it showed both consideration and a certain degree of forethought. He’d put that in his last report. 

“Iron Bull,” the Herald said.

“Hey, boss,” the Bull said, carefully light. “Want to join us? I can buy you a round with your own money.” 

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t really drink,” Lavellan said. Which was probably smart. The Bull didn’t know many elves who could hold their liquor. Skinner and Dalish certainly couldn’t, though that didn’t stop them drinking until they both passed out every time Krem broke open the casks. “I just wanted to update you on some things.” Black eyes flicked to Krem.

The Bull shrugs. “Go ahead, boss. Got no secrets from my lieutenant.”

The Herald nodded, though those eyes were narrowed. “I wanted to let you know that Dorian’s decided to stay for now, to help us close the Rift. I hope that won’t cause any trouble.”

_ Just ‘Dorian’, _ part of the Bull noted, _ interesting_. The rest of him was suddenly very much not looking at Krem. 

“No worries, boss,” the Bull said, with a chuckle. “I don’t hold his background against him. If he’s okay working with a Qunari, I’m sure we’ll get along fine.” 

“Glad to hear it,” the Herald said, but those eyes weren’t looking at the Bull anymore, they were looking at Krem, fuck, fuck. “Well. Enjoy your drinks. Lieutenant.”

“Your worship.”

Krem waited until Lavellan had passed back out through the open door into the bright snowy world outside. Then he said, “Dorian?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Bull said, inanely, not sure what words would spring onto his tongue next. 

“Don’t- Chief, what-”

The Bull didn’t let him finish. He put a hand on Krem’s shoulder. “I’ll see you back at camp in a couple hours.”

“What? Chief-”

The Bull stood up, his knee protesting, and legged it for the door.

Outside he walked down the streets of Haven without really seeing them. Snow was flurrying through the air. The sounds of people talking, blacksmiths’ hammers striking anvils, horses complaining, it all seemed to fade into the background.

He found himself making a big circuit of the frozen lake, his feet following what was clearly a well maintained trail, though it was silent and empty now. He was alone, which he hadn’t been in…. In a very long time.

_ Early morning walks in Alam, climbing up the hill outside town to see the sun rise over the sea. Most beautiful sunrise in the world, on the days the fog didn’t obscure it. _

_ Vasaad following him out, the morning after the fire. Bread rolls in his hands. The taste of salt. _

He knew he should get back to camp. To his boys.

But it was a while before he noticed the sky had darkened and the stars were shining out. Nothing beat Haven for beautiful stars, though the constellations were different here than the ones he’d learned as a child.

He went back to the campfires, shivering.

He had his own tent. Privilege of command. It was near the fire, too, so it wasn’t as cold as it might have been. Still seemed cold, though, when he went inside. His traveling writing desk sat in one corner, but his eye hurt and he didn’t want to strain it with candlelight tonight. He wasn’t due to drop a report for another week anyway. 

He took his boots off, started removing his pants and then decided it was too cold for that. He lay down on his bedroll, careful of his horns. 

He’d gotten used to sharing a tent, the last two weeks on the road. With Inquisition soldiers who weren’t much for conversation, but body heat was body heat, and it came with small noises and movements. His world now wasn’t entirely silent, but the heavy canvas of the tent muffled a lot.

After half an hour, the tent flap opened. Normally that would prompt Bull to start calculating the best way to disarm a potential intruder, but he could feel that it was Krem. 

“Could hear you brooding from three tents away,” Krem announced. He was wearing a big oversized shirt and very warm-looking leggings. “Want to talk about it?”

“Nah,” the Bull said.

“Me either, I’m too fucking tired,” Krem said, and flopped down next to him on the bedroll. He was hot as a furnace. The Bull let out a long breath, and closed his eye. 

Turned out the Herald didn’t waste time. The mages were allowed one good night’s rest, then it was off up the mountain to try and close that damn thing in the sky. “I want the Chargers in Haven,” Cullen told the Bull. “We can’t know for sure what might happen when we pour unstable magic into that thing, and I’ve promised the Inquisition’s protection to this village.” He hesitated, then said, more quietly, “We’re also only leaving a very few number of templars to watch the mage children.”

“Right,” the Bull said.

“You don’t have to guard them yourselves,” Cullen said. “But if the village suddenly has to deal with an abomination…”

“We’ve got your back, commander,” the Bull said. Cullen nodded. 

There was a man in need of some stress relief. Probably not from the Bull, though. From chat with the templars and the soldiers they trained, he knew Cullen could get the Bull’s brand of relaxation from a dozen corners if he was inclined. But there were plenty of other ways to help.

So Krem and the Bull organized patrols and set the rest of the guys to training exercises, and tried not to walk around looking up at the sky the whole day. When the big… rift… hole.. Thing started flashing bright green and shooting what had to be demons onto the top of the mountain, though, everyone pretty much stopped pretending and just stood there, watching. 

The Bull tried to tell himself he was glad to be down here, away from all those demons. That his job was just to write reports, anyway. But it felt wrong. He should be up there protecting the Herald.

Pavus was up there, too. 

He tried not to think about that. 

The whole thing took less than an hour. Almost anticlimactic, really. But when the green tear in the sky folded in on itself and vanished, leaving only clear, cloudless blue, the shouts from the village echoed so loudly off the mountainsides that the Bull spared a thought to worry about avalanches. After he was done cheering himself hoarse, though.

Without anyone particularly organizing anything, the townsfolk lined themselves up to welcome the conquering heroes home. The Bull stood well behind the lines and still had a great view over everyone’s heads. He did quick estimates on the people coming back down the mountain. Some casualties, looked like, but remarkably few. The Herald’s inner circle were all there. Pavus was riding behind Lavellan, deep in argument with Solas. Discussing something magical, presumably.

A wave of motion rippled through the onlookers as they knelt in the snow before the Herald’s black horse. The elf was making some attempt at concealing discomfort. It was heroic, but not very successful. The Bull remained standing, and waved cheerily. He noted who else was standing; Tethras and a few other dwarves, the irritable Chancellor, that Grey Warden from the Hinterlands.

The Herald saw the Bull, and nodded at him, face relaxing a little. Then the horse passed by. A moment later, the Bull’s knees went weak, and he stumbled under a surge of feeling from the part of his heart that lived outside his chest.

“Oy, horns,” Sera said from somewhere near his shoulder. She’d stopped her horse and was glaring at him. The horse nibbled on the Bull’s pauldron. “You alright?”

“Sure,” the Bull said. He was tall enough to see over the Herald’s back, to see Krem and some of the chargers, on the opposite side of the square. To see Krem and Stitches down on their knees, while Dalish, Rocky and Skinner stood uncomfortably behind him. The Bull could feel Krem’s awe and the strength of his belief, warm and bright as sun on snow.

“You faint and you’ll squish someone,” Sera warned. 

“I’m good. Thanks.”

“Fine, whatever. Are we having a victory bash or what?”

“They’re slaughtering the druffalo right now. It’s going to be one hell of a party.”

“Grand!”

It wasn’t that the Bull was unfamiliar with spiritual feelings, even if he hadn’t felt them much himself since Seheron.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t known Krem was Andrastian.

He saw the fur of Commander Cullen’s cloak, the big gorgeous cream horse, and pulled himself together with purpose, report composing itself in his head. But it never all turned off, except in the depths of the battle rage, so part of him was still thinking, is that it, then? Job done? I can tell the Viddasala, nothing to worry about? 

But we’ll stay until things are back to something like normal. Plenty of bandits and apostates and crazed Templars to fight, still. Krem will want to stay. See how it shakes out for this prophet.

And, so deep and quiet he could almost pretend the voice wasn’t there: there’s always chaos outside the Qun. What does it matter? 

The party could probably be honestly described as grand. The Bull had been to a lot of parties like it, everyone drunk on victory and the miracle of living another day, except this one had religious fervor mixed in too. The combination was potent. The Bull got a mug of beer from one of the huge casks that had been opened, but didn’t drink it, just held it in his hand and strolled around Haven, keeping an eye on the rowdier pockets of revelers. Last he’d checked the Herald was still cloistered in the Chantry with Cass, Cullen and Red. He hoped that group finished and came down to relax soon. 

He didn’t know where Pavus was, and that itched. Didn’t like the idea of a magister running around on his own, even if he’d done nothing but provide invaluable help so far.

He should be in his tent writing his overdue report. Instead he kept walking.

He was glad to see the Inquisition guards on duty hadn’t helped themselves to the free alcohol. Someone had brought them heaping bowls of food. Good thought. When he waved at them they grinned and waved back. He felt satisfied; it had taken some effort, a few dice games and a campaign of bad puns, but the horns weren’t making them nervous any more.

The Chantry bell started ringing.

The Bull didn’t run up the steps to the guard wall. He walked, carefully, so by the time he got to the top, people were shouting. 

There was an army coming through the mountain pass. 

The Bull looked at hundreds of stars against the black of the mountains, and thought, this doesn’t make any fucking sense. Armies don’t just appear out of nowhere. You can’t hide a fucking army. Even the Chargers could only move quickly, not secretly. Unless they came from the south, somehow, but that didn’t make sense either.

Except it did.

His first year on Seheron, he’d been chatting up a potential informant at the pier in Alam when the gulls went silent. The moment of quiet before the bells had started ringing had been deeply unnerving, but then he’d looked out across the water and seen the fleet that hadn’t been there five minutes before. Black sails, and black-robed bas-saarebas dispelling the remnants of their enchantment.

Then the bombardment had started.

The Bull took a step back from the edge of the wall, though the enemy was nowhere within range of any weapon he knew of, not yet. His hands were balled into fists. He relaxed them, breathed deep, and thought about Krem. Calmed himself until he could distinguish the phantom sensations, Krem making the “I’m okay” sign with his right hand. The Bull did the sign himself, felt Krem’s relief.

“Get the civilians to the Chantry,” he told the guards, the ones who looked less panicky. “Go. Now.” He bellowed the last few words, and jumped down the nearest ladder himself without waiting to see if they obeyed. 

The streets of Haven were a mess of fear and confusion. It was the exact fucking situation he’d sworn never to land his boys in, but nothing to be done about that now. The Chargers were by the lake. The boss was up at the Chantry. 

The Bull turned, and ran up the hill.

As he passed the tavern, someone stepped out of the shadows. He managed to restrain himself from taking a swing at them. He missed his axe, resting by his tent. He had a mace on his belt but it wasn’t the same.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Dorian Pavus asked him. His eyes glittered in the dark, along with all those little mirrors on his silly mage outfit.

“Invasion,” the Bull said. “No idea who, but there’s at least five thousand soldiers out there. I think siege weapons too, but hard to tell in the dark.”

Pavus hissed out a Tevene obscenity. 

The thing was. Pavus wasn’t a spy. It was tempting to suspect him, but it was just… really obvious he wasn’t. 

“Going to see if the Herald can use my help,” the Bull said. “You coming?” 

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Pavus said, flashing really nice white teeth. 

They’d only got another hundred yards when a shadow passed over the moon and the world went dark. Pavus, looking up, said, “Vishante kaffas, is that a dragon?”

The Bull felt the rush of air and heat. No time for thought, just action. His hand on the thick leather of Pavus’s pauldron, shoving him to the ground. Throwing his own bulk over the human. The devouring fury of dragonfire, passing far too close above his horns. The hiss and scream of snow boiling and wood snapping. 

Then the dragon had passed them, and the Bull rolled away. There’d been no stabbing pain, so either it wasn’t Pavus’s writing or all that leather had protected them from skin to skin contact.

“There’s really no need to get physical,” Pavus said, and the Bull felt the tingle of a barrier laying itself over his skin.

He could smell something, under the strong odor of fire and blood. Human sweat, scented oils, maybe some kind of perfume. Pavus’s scent. The danger was putting all the Bull’s responses into overdrive, and unfortunately that included one which was very interested in how the Vint smelled. Definitely not the fucking time.

“Let’s get to that Chantry,” he said.

After that things happened in a haze of battle and fear and nightmarish unreality. Templars twisted into monstrosities by red crystal formations. What looked like a fucking archdemon, and ugh, a dragon with Blight was a great way to make something awesome into something terrible. An avalanche. The loss of the Herald.

The Bull actually felt himself calming down, once the problem was simplified into a bunch of despairing refugees fleeing through hostile terrain. He’d dealt with these kinds of problems before. Sure, they were probably all going to die, but at least he’d die with his boys by his side, doing a job they knew how to do.

Lavellan came back. Again. The Bull was really going to have to try not letting the Herald out of his sight in future.

They found Skyhold.

He and Pavus didn’t exchange a single word the entire time.

As soon as he had a spare moment in Skyhold, the Chargers settled in and assigned to wall-repair duty, Krem quartermastering his little heart out, the Bull took an hour to write out the longest report he’d sent yet. There was a lot to cover, particularly when he was writing one version to keep Red in reading material and another to leave in a drop-point the next time he left the mountains. It was understandable that Pavus only rated a single terse sentence.

A knock on his door, familiar in its cadence. “Come in, Krem,” the Bull called. Krem opened doors quickly and sharply. The little tells of accustomed anxiety not quite covered over with smooth professionalism. 

“You couldn’t pick a room with a ceiling, Chief?” Krem asked wryly. 

“Hey, I’d still be in my tent with you guys, but Josie told me I needed an office,” the Bull said. He watched Krem close the door. Not a great sign. 

“Dorian Pavus,” Krem said. 

“So you heard the last name,” the Bull said. He put his quill back in its stand and moved the parchment he’d been writing on carefully out of the way. Shifted in his chair to look Krem in the face. _ Kadan _deserved honesty. At the very least the appearance of honesty.

“Heard the gossip about the evil Tevinter Magister corrupting the mind of the Inquisitor, sure,” Krem said. “People seem to just love telling me about it. Is he...”

There was an awkward pause. The Bull broke it, finally. “He didn’t react at all to my name,” he said. “Maybe it’s not the right Dorian Pavus.”

“You think?” Krem asked.

“I don’t know,” the Bull said. “It’s not really your business, Krem.”

He regretted that about as soon as he said it, but Krem just raised his eyebrows. “Someone’s in a mood,” he said. “But I can’t really blame you. Look, I just wanted to say I’m not, you know.”

The Bull tilted his head.

“Don’t make me say it,” Krem groaned.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Bull said. “Honest.”

“_Jealous_,” Krem ground out. “I’m not _ jealous,_ you asshole.”

“Oh,” the Bull said. “Right. I forgot that was a thing with you humans.”

“Oh Maker,” Krem said, and stepped away from the door. Went over to the bedroll that took up most of the right side of the room and sat on it, legs crossed. He was wearing less armor than usual, just his cuirass and cuisses, and a thick padded shirt that probably kept him nice and toasty in the cold mountain air. The Bull really should do something about that roof at some point. Put it down on the list.

“Your people,” Krem said. “You all have multiple soulmates, then?”

“We don’t call them soulmates,” the Bull said. “And no. Some have one, some have none. I knew a guy once who had _ nine._ All on the same arm, too.”

“Right,” Krem said, “well, we mostly just have one, and when there’s more than one, it’s a big deal. Dramatic play material. Your soulmate’s supposed to be your true love, and if you’ve got two and they’re both alive at the same time, and they meet each other, hey, you’ve got three acts and a swordfight right there.”

“I kind of picked up on some of that,” the Bull said. More than some, but it felt important to let Krem be his teacher, at that moment. “That can’t be how it works out in real life, though.”

Krem shrugged. “It varies, I guess. You know in the army, the men all loved comparing theirs? I told them mine said _ Lavinia_. Then I’d make up stories in my head.”

“You told me when we met that you’d thought I’d be a prostitute,” the Bull said.

“Yeah. I had this fantasy that we’d meet when we were both off duty, and we’d save up money and open a shop somewhere. Stupid kid dreams.”

“Krem,” the Bull said.

“I don’t regret it in the slightest,” Krem said. “Lots of people get surprised by who they fall in love with. There’s someone out there for me, probably. And I wouldn’t trade what I have for anything. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Still, the Bull thought. It must have meant something to that young soldier, the idea that somewhere out in the world was that _ true love_, a person who wouldn’t care what he looked like under the armor. The Bull had never thought about it like that. To him, their relationship had slotted perfectly into the space left vacant by Vasaad and Mashev and the rest of the beloved dead. 

“I love you,” the Bull said. “You know that, right?”

“‘Course, Chief,” Krem scoffed, and the Bull pretended not to notice the roughness in his voice. “My point is, I’m not going to be challenging your altus to any duels. Unless he really fucks up, and then I’ll just plant my maul in his face.”

“His hands, Krem,” the Bull corrects. “It’s hands when you’re fighting a mage, remember.”

Krem responded with a rude gesture. 

“So you’re okay if I fuck him, then,” the Bull said. “Just so we’re clear.” Krem had never had an issue with the Bull fucking anyone before, but this was soulmate stuff. Unknown territory.

“I mean, he’s an altus,” Krem said, “so he’s probably a prick, but if he’s your soulmate-” he used the Tevene word- “then he’s got to be worth something. I’ve got your back, however you want to handle it.”

“Thanks,” the Bull said. “I appreciate it.”

Krem stood up, and patted the Bull’s bare shoulder. Warmth radiated from the point of contact. “Good talk,” he said. “Now I’m going to try and drink until I forget we had it.”

“Sounds good,” the Bull said. “Make sure you get some sleep. Tomorrow’s probably going to be a pretty long day.”

“You too,” Krem said. “Don’t lie awake all night pining for your pretty boy.”

“Get out before I dock your pay.”

The Bull listened to Krem’s boots going down the stairs, and then sat alone in the quiet, trying to write the next sentence of his report.

After a while he gave up, signed it _ Hissrad_, wrote _ Anaan esaam Qun _ along the bottom, and folded the paper. 

Tomorrow he’d get Grim to hit him with the stick. Grim never asked questions.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bull and Dorian get to know each other. Bull makes a mistake.

_ Someone who’ll need your help, ashkaari. _

The Bull chewed it over, tramping around the Storm Coast with Pavus at his heels complaining about the weather. It was kind of fun to listen to. Pavus had an educated vocabulary, a creative tongue, and a nice voice, warm and a little breathy at the edges. Fun to watch him fight, too; his style seemed to lean in the direction of flashy and explosive. Well, it was fun up until they went into the wrong cave and got swarmed by spiders, and Pavus hit them with some kind of magical mind slam. The Bull felt the wave of fear pass straight through his bowels before hitting the beasts. He growled as they scurried out of range of his axe blade, because that was better than whimpering. 

“Can we not do that again?” Lavellan asked, calmly. 

“Apologies,” Pavus said. “I’m still getting the hang of this ‘fighting on a team’ thing.” 

“It’s okay,” the Bull said. “Damn, that felt creepy, though.”

“It’s supposed to,” Dorian said. “If you could try not getting in the way next time, I’d appreciate that.”

The Bull felt a shudder try to go through him at the thought of _ next time_. Squashed it. Not helpful. How to deal with fear? Use your training. Size him up. Pavus was good in a fight, but reckless, and relied too much on his horror spells; a stealth attack could take him down, or a berserker. More interesting was the way he poked at the people around him. He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. He wanted attention, but resented it, at the same time. 

Meant trying to get the approval of the other mages, except then he kept on putting his foot in it and getting in arguments with them. Never got nasty, though. The Bull listened out for any hint of rage, cruelty, annoyance at being asked to cater to the whims of lesser beings. Any of the things he’d seen in magisters on Seheron. He didn’t find any of it.

About seven years back, he’d been asked to do this thing for the Ben-Hassrath. Cross the border into the Imperium, pose as a slave, infiltrate a Minrathous town house, do a few things at a party. He’d told Krem where he was going and why, though he’d left out the details. Krem had wanted to come. That was the first time the Bull had realized just how careful he was going to have to be, to earn the loyalty he’d been given. 

He’d convinced Krem to stay with the company, cover for him until he got back. He’d covered up the mark on his chest with really expensive makeup, crossed the border, met up with his contact, and pretended to be a slave for three weeks. It wasn’t the worst job he’d ever done, or the hardest cover. Parts of it were almost fun.

Other parts were really not fun. 

But he remembered the party, his ‘mistress’ showing him off to her fancy guests. A lot of the ‘Vints had been like the ones he’d known on Seheron. Monsters that talked and walked like people. Some had seemed almost ordinary. A guy who’d just wanted to drone on about military history to anyone who’d listen. Some kids who only cared about getting drunk and having sex in a closet. 

Dorian might have been one of those kids. The Bull didn’t think so; he had a good memory for faces, even faces glimpsed briefly in bad lighting. But it was possible.

Wouldn’t do any good, thinking too hard about it. World was a screwed up place. He’d seen children starving on the streets of Nevarra’s capital. He didn’t hold that against Cass. The important thing right now was Corypheus, and these people were all risking their lives to help in that fight.

“You’re very quiet, Iron Bull,” Pavus said.

“Just thinking,” the Bull said. “That fear thing you do- can you make them run towards me next time? I get everyone’s attention, you circle round while Sera covers you, then you drive them right into my axe.”

Pavus’s forehead creased when he was processing. “Then you run the risk of being in the area of effect again.”

His bowels were clenching just thinking about that, but “Better than having to sprint after my targets while carrying a sixty-pound weapon. I can take it.” It would be good practice, he told himself. Sooner or later they’d be fighting fear demons again, and anything that could help prepare him for that was useful. It would also be useful practice for if he did end up needing to take Pavus down.

“I suppose I should be grateful you recognize my tactical value,” the mage said. “I’ve been told you’re a true Qunari. That you report back to superiors on Par Vollen.”

So they were doing this now. The Bull stepped over a small rivulet of water, splashed through a muddy puddle. The boss and Sera were a meter ahead, playing some word game. 

“Yep,” the Bull said. “That going to be a problem for you?”

“Oh no,” Pavus said, with a wave of a hand. “Just wondering when I should be expecting a dagger in my back.”

“Depends,” the Bull said. “You use that magic of yours to burn down any dormitories full of kids lately? Roast prisoners of war alive? Poison the water supply of a whole village?”

Shit, he thought, seeing Pavus’s face change. Shit, he hadn’t meant to go off like that. He could see it getting through the mage’s automatic defenses. The charges were too specific, rang too much of experience, unlike the stereotype-based accusations he was doubtless getting used to receiving. 

“Not lately, no,” Pavus said, and the surprise and faint shock in his voice made something in the Bull’s chest relax enough for him to chuckle.

“Then don’t worry. You’re not high on my list of folks who need a knife in the back.”

“But I’m an altus,” Pavus persisted, waving his staff. “A mage. Don’t you want me bound and leashed?”

_ I’d buy you dinner first _ ran through his head. Running on automatic. Diffusing tension, deflecting suspicion, that was always priority number one. With the Herald it looked like honesty, with Madame de Fer, submission. With Pavus, that animosity in his voice, the way he looked at the Bull’s muscles- it’d be flirting. Take that genuine fear and dislike, make it into a joke, an annoyance. He’s not the bogeyman of Pavus’s pampered altus childhood, he’s just obnoxious old Bull, too horny (hah! Horny!) to be worth goading. Plus, there’d be something really satisfying about derailing Pavus mid-rant. 

But the Bull made it a policy not to start things he wasn’t prepared to finish, and there was a lot about this situation he wasn’t prepared for at all. 

“What I want is for you to stop yapping,” he said instead. “Focus on all the spiders and darkspawn.”

“I’ve been told my yapping is delightful, thank you,” Pavus muttered, and Sera, swinging back to them, snorted. 

“Bet you don’t shut it even when you’re doing it,” Sera said. But there was no bite to it. The Bull was surprised to realize she liked the ‘Vint. Huh. He hadn’t seen that one coming. Pavus seemed to represent everything Sera despised. 

“I hope you’re not fighting, children,” Lavellan called from the front. The Bull waved a hand dismissively, and tried smiling at Pavus. The mage just looked back at him quizzically, but at least he didn’t flinch.

Thing was, the Bull was running with three objectives at once. Objective one, find a way to get along with the ‘Vint mage so they’d be able to work together to help take down the crazy ancient bastard threatening the entire world. Objective two, gather information on the Inquisitor’s inner circle, to send to Par Vollen in case… just in case. Objective three, figure out what Pavus might need from him, and then figure out how to give it.

The first two objectives played nice with each other, for the moment. The last one was maybe a problem.

It had always been pretty obvious what Krem needed. It had been clear with Vasaad, too, even if in the end, Hissrad had failed to deliver.

He wasn’t at all sure what he had to offer a Tevinter nobleman, aside from sex, which he’d certainly given to plenty of noblemen before, but that would probably get weird with the soulmate thing.

It was a puzzle that was distracting him from the first two objectives, and that wasn’t great. 

He got a clear demonstration of exactly how not great it was an hour later, when they ran straight into a rift, and had to fight more fucking demons. The Bull tried to focus on how much he hated the things, their spindly legs and wrong number of eyes, tried to pour all his being into rage and bloodlust so the fear couldn’t touch him. Still, the red fog in his vision didn’t stop him seeing the terror demon appear from nowhere behind Pavus, reaching for his throat with fingers like knives. 

The Bull shoved aside the thing he was fighting and barrelled forward with all the speed he could summon, a wordless roar tearing its way out of his throat. He hit the creature, knocked it over, managed to end up on top. Those knife fingers ripped a long line of pain down his chest. Pavus was shouting something. The Bull couldn’t distinguish the words but he guessed the meaning, and rolled away from the enemy. When he was barely half a foot away from it he felt the scorching heat of flame on the side of his body, and when he finished rolling and scrambled up into a crouch he saw the thing writhing as it burned. 

No time to pause and overthink things, not with two demons still moving and the freaky wrongness of the open rift at their backs. The Bull hefted his axe, let another yell rise up out of him.

Five minutes later, Lavellan was sealing up the rift, Sera was poking at the piles of ash and goo with the end of her bow, face wrinkled with disgust, and Dorian was looking at the Bull, brow creased again. “Fasta vass, you’re bleeding a lot,” he said, and his hand reached out as though to touch the sticky red expanse of the Bull’s chest.

“I wouldn’t touch,” the Bull said, taking a tiny step backward. “Still got vitaar on under all this gunk.” Blood dried fast, and his torso was starting to feel crusted and gross. But hey, the rain would probably wash it off. 

“Right,” Dorian said, snatching his hand back. “Are you-all right?” 

The Bull laughed. “Takes more than a little scratch like this to put me down. Sweet of you to care, though, big guy.”

“I wasn’t- I just wanted to thank you,” Pavus snapped. “For your assistance with the terror demon.”

“Aw, don’t mention it,” the Bull said. “I’m the one supposed to be taking the hits. Hope you sleep a little better tonight.”

Pavus frowned at him. “Why would I sleep better?”

“Worrying about one less knife in the back? Hopefully?”

Dorian snorted. “There’s certainly no subtlety to you. I imagine any attack would come from the front.”

“Yeah,” the Bull lied, “I’m a full frontal kind of guy.” He winked.

_Close fast from behind while he’s distracted, grab the staff and twist, try to break his wrists. Couple punches to break the barrier he’ll have thrown up, then a knife to the neck; anything slower is too dangerous. _

Mostly habit, at this point. 

“You’re something, all right,” Pavus said. 

That was the last rift on the coast, so they headed back to camp. There wasn’t much sunset to see, but the gray light was draining from the sky. 

“We took the liberty of setting up tents for you and your party, your worship,” the requisitions officer said. Lavellan nodded at her. 

The Bull found Sera sitting on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the strip of sea just still visible in the dimming light. 

“I think Pavus and the boss are sharing,” the Bull said, “so I guess that puts you and me in the second tent.”

“Why’d you call him Pavus?” Sera asked. “Paaavous.” Her face contorted as she pushed and pulled at the syllables. “His name’s Dorian. Only pompous asses go by last names. And cute scouts playing hard to get.”

“And Blackwall,” the Bull reminded her.

She snorted. “What, no. Blackwall’s just got the one name. That’s a Warden thing.” Her eyes widened. “It is, isn’t it? He’d have told me if he had some other name, right?”

“Don’t ask me,” the Bull said, “no one ever gave me one name, let alone two.”

“You’re distracting me,” Sera accused him. “From the point, which is- right. Sharing. Not doing it. You’ll roll over and stab me with those pointers in the night! And you look like you snore.”

“I promise not to stab you with my horns, Sera.”

“You do snore. Knew it.”

“If you have a problem, take it up with the boss.”

“I will,” Sera said, “just wait. Oh, hey Dorian.”

Footsteps. Sera’s nimble patter, passing a heavier tread.

The Bull turned. Pavus- no, Sera was right. Dorian was standing there, holding a wet cloth in one hand, a bag in the other. “That cut of yours needs to be cleaned,” he said. His hand reached out.

The Bull flinched backwards.

They both froze, unsteady, suddenly unbalanced. Dorian’s gray eyes were wide.

“You’re frightened of me,” Dorian said, sounding fascinated. 

“Thanks for the cloth,” the Bull said. He hooked it carefully with one claw. Their fingers didn’t brush. “I can clean this up myself.” 

He waited until he was sure Dorian had left before beginning to sponge the dried blood off his skin. The cut sliced straight through one of the letters. It wasn’t deep enough to scar. 

The bag contained bandages. He felt a wave of gratitude wash over him, as he wrapped the bandages around his chest, watching the letters disappear under simple white. 

He puttered around camp a bit longer after that, watched Sera finish arguing with Lavellan and stomp into the second tent, watched Dorian watching him, watched Dorian and Lavellan disappear into the first tent. Went into the second one. Sera was fast asleep, and, ironically, loudly snoring herself. 

The Bull reached for Krem. The distance was too far, really, the connection too quiet for any real sense of what Krem was doing, but the Bull felt that he was there, that he was good, that he was probably sleeping. It helped the Bull eventually get to sleep himself. 

The cut didn’t scar. They got back to Skyhold without incident. Dorian disappeared up into the main tower. The Bull trained with his men, and with Cullen’s men, and with the mages, and with half a dozen new groups that had thrown their lot in with the Inquisition. He started sticking a bandage on his chest before he had sex with people. He felt weird about it, and it maybe wasn’t necessary- _ bas _had a really strong taboo about pretending you didn’t notice the names on people’s bodies when you were getting off- but it still felt like the right thing to do. He slept with a serving girl named Madalena, an Inquisition soldier named Berger, and one of Leliana’s scouts, an elf named Ceran who the Bull kept a close eye on while the two of them were in the Bull’s room. He wrote two reports that he dutifully handed off to Leliana, climbing all the steps to the top of the tower and not pausing at the library level for longer than it took to spot Dorian’s silhouette. He wrote coded reports that would stay hidden until the next time the Inquisitor’s business took him to a major town.

But the next time he was called to join an outgoing party, it was a trip to the desert. That was all right. He didn’t mind sand or heat. But the Boss was bringing Dorian, too, and that made things a little awkward.

Cole didn’t help.

“Rilienus, skin tan like fine whiskey, cheekbones shaded, lips curl when he smiles across a room. Bracelet on his wrist, twisted gold, serpents devouring each other. The name is hidden underneath. He would have said yes.”

“Don’t,” Dorian said, sharp, wounded, struggling through sand. The wind whistled over the dunes. “Please, just don’t.”

No good choices for the Bull. Intervening would ruin any pretense that he hadn’t been listening. Letting it go on gave the kid a chance to dig the knife in deeper. The Bull made the choice that might damage Dorian’s pride slightly less. “Hey, Cole,” he said. “You ever played a game of chess?”

Cole’s eyes, far too pale and colorless in their shadowed hollows. “Vasaad always moves his Arishok too early. When you take it he laughs, loud, light, lingering.” For a moment his cadence shifted, his child’s voice deepening. “Not like I can bluff against you, kadan.”

“Okay,” the Bull said, shifting everything _ that _stirred up to someplace it would be more useful. “So you know about the Arishok. What about the other pieces?”

Ten minutes of discussion about why Ben-Hassrath moved sideways later, Cole drifted away towards the Inquisitor, and Dorian drifted back to the Bull’s side.

“Taking the hits again?” he murmured. 

“That all right? Sorry if I overstepped.”

“No, it’s- I appreciate it,” Dorian said. He sighed. “I know it’s my own fault for encouraging him. My curiosity is always my downfall.”

“Kid’s gotta learn he can’t always fix things by tugging at them.” It wasn’t really agreement or disagreement, but Dorian nodded. 

“Speaking of my unwise curiosity,” Dorian said, “I do have to wonder why you’re more afraid of me than of him.”

Shit. Not talking about it wasn’t going to be an option, then.

“I know I’m an evil ‘Vint mage,” Dorian said, “but I promise, I’m thoroughly housetrained, and I have enough manners not to go shuffling through people’s brains without permission.”

“Maybe I’m just intimidated by you,” the Bull suggested. 

Dorian raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Intimidated?”

“Sure,” the Bull improvised. “A hot, smart, competent man like you- who wouldn’t get a little flustered when you’re around?”

“Well,” Dorian said, “I’m glad someone in this uncivilized wasteland appreciates my qualities,” but his face was flushed, and the Bull could see he was the one who’d flustered Dorian, this round.

That should have felt good. He liked flirting; it was a fun game with simple rules and no sore losers if you played it right. And everything he’d said about Dorian was true. But there was an ache somewhere in his stomach. An uneasiness. Like he’d just fucked up and was going to be in checkmate in seven but he didn’t see it yet.

But the trip resolved itself, and no hanging sword fell on him. 

The days lengthened into summer in Skyhold, heating up the Herald’s Rest, dappling his bedroom floor with sunlight. Dorian leaned against a fence, watching Krem and the Bull train. 

“The Inquisitor’s taking me to Redcliffe,” Dorian said. “Anything I can pick up for you?”

For a moment the Bull thought of the stacks of coded reports hidden under the loose floorboard in his room, waiting for the Redcliffe dead drop, but that was nonsensical. He’d never even involved Krem with as much as passing a note. 

“Cookies?” the Bull suggested. “Last time there was a baker selling sweet things in the market.”

“I’ll keep my eyes out,” Dorian promised, and waved a hand to the Bull as he left. It was a casual gesture, and shouldn’t have left the Bull staring after him. 

They’d become friends, at some point? Friendly, at least. So that was a thing.

“You two worked things out yet?” Krem said. The Bull turned back to him. Krem looked uncomfortable, which made sense. There weren’t a lot of topics that the two of them couldn’t freely discuss in public, but at some point this had become one of them. 

“Y’know, sometimes it’s better to take things slow,” the Bull said.

Krem snorted. “Not your usual style, Chief.”

The Bull drove his axe blade into the ground, let the hilt take some of his weight. _ You take much longer cozying up to that smuggler and she’ll just vanish into the mist, boss. _

_ It’s a delicate process, kadan. I can’t be interested in her specifically. I’m just Hissrad, listening to the village’s problems, promising they’ll be helped even though most people think I’m full of shit, and then I’m tired after a long day so I just like to go down to the dock and have myself a fish sandwich, talk about the weather with the woman making my sandwich, that’s all it is… _

“Guess I have hidden depths,” the Bull said.

“Don’t take too long,” Krem said. “It’ll get weird.” 

“There’s gotta be a dick joke in this conversation somewhere, but I’m just not finding it,” the Bull said. “Come on, get your shield up again.”

He didn’t even realize Dorian was back until the mage entered the tavern and made a beeline for the Bull’s chair. Dorian looked immaculate, all his face paint perfect as far as the Bull could tell, which wasn’t far. Instead of the usual half robe and mess of buckles, he was wearing a tight sleeveless leather vest, and even tighter leather pants. 

For a moment the Bull just felt warm and pleased all over, to have Dorian in front of him, looking at him in a very particular way. Then he _ remembered_. It felt a bit like missing a stair step in the dark and falling down on your face.

_ Shit, _ he thought. _ I _ like _ him. I want it to be him. _

_ Fuck. _

“You should buy me a drink,” Dorian said. The Bull would have wagered a week’s salary that Dorian had had a few already. Hey, the Bull wasn’t one to judge liquid courage, even if he didn’t do that kind of thing himself.

What he wanted to know was, was this Dorian psyching himself up to do something nervewracking- or numbing himself before doing something destructive?

“All right,” the Bull said agreeably. “Cabot, get this man whatever he wants.” 

Dorian leaned into the Bull’s space. “Tell me about my many good qualities again,” he said. 

“Okay,” the Bull said. “You’re really hot, especially in those pants, damn.”

“I know,” Dorian said. “But it’s nice of you to notice. Go on.”

“You’re smart. Know a lot of stuff. Mostly weird mage stuff, but still.”

“We can’t all dedicate ourselves to the study of cutting people into multiple pieces.”

“True.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“You’re confident,” the Bull said. “Know what you want.” He watched how Dorian held himself. He’d had a drink but he wasn’t properly shitfaced. Had maybe come in here looking for an alternative. Like a Qunari going to a Tamassran, when they were feeling too much, because under the Qun you didn’t use alcohol to excess like that.

The Bull didn’t have Tamassran training, but he didn’t mind helping people out, as best he could. But Dorian wouldn’t want sex in the dark. He’d want to be viewed and admired. And the Bull would be all for that, except. 

Dorian leaned forward. “What do I want, then?”

_ A distraction for whatever’s gotten under your skin. _

Well. He could provide that much, at least.

He must have missed his cue, because Dorian leaned back a little, and said, “If I’ve misinterpreted, I’d appreciate being informed before I waste more of my highly valuable time.”

“You haven’t,” the Bull said. “I’m interested. It’s just there’s some stuff you should know, first.”

Dorian sat down, propped his chin up on one hand, frowned. “This sounds complicated. I don’t know that I like complicated.”

“If you’d rather find someone else tonight, I won’t take it personally,” the Bull said, trying not to hope too hard for reprieve.

But Dorian shook his head. “I’ve told you, curiosity is my fatal flaw, and now you’ve piqued it. Very well, let’s hear it. Do you need to be tickled on the soles of your feet to achieve climax? I knew a fellow like that once.”

“I’d rather have this conversation in private, if it’s all the same to you,” the Bull said.

“All right,” Dorian said. “Lead on.”

The stairs always creaked under the Bull’s weight. No light came from Sera’s door, and there were no weird kids lurking around in the empty storeroom. Nothing interrupted the Bull’s long walk up to the tower room; nothing interrupted his thoughts; nothing interrupted his sense of Dorian, following at his back.

He unlocked the door, moving on automatic, and stepped into the dark room, and sensed Dorian’s careless hand gesture as the candles flared into life. Dorian reached for him, intending, the Bull thought, to trail a hand casually along his arm, the next step in a practiced dance, and the Bull- stepped back. In the flickering candlelight he got a good view of the way Dorian’s expression shuttered. The ‘Vint’s masklike smile was immaculate as he sat down on the Bull’s bed. 

“Bit chilly up here,” Dorian commented.

“Yeah,” the Bull said, a little distractedly, “Krem’s always complaining about that.”

“Ah,” Dorian said. “This complication you mentioned- is Cremisius-”

“No, no, it’s not like that,” the Bull said hastily. Then he paused, unsure and horribly confused in a way he rarely allowed himself to be. “I mean- well- shit. Look, I’m just going to show you something.” He reached for the buckle of his shoulder strap. The harness was stiff, but came apart easily enough, revealing the slightly paler skin beneath.

“As stripping goes I’ve seen more erotic-” Dorian began, and then stopped. 

The harness was in the Bull’s hands. He hung it up carefully, on one of the pegs he’d installed specifically. For a few seconds it gave him something to look at that wasn’t Dorian. Then, with it hanging up where it was supposed to, he moved towards the window, to give Dorian a straight path to the door if he needed it. 

“I see,” Dorian said, eventually.

“The handwriting’s yours, then?” He knew the answer, but the question still needed to be asked.

“It is.”

“It’s probably going to hurt like fuck the first time we touch each other. Seemed like important information.”

“And you never thought to mention this before,” Dorian said. There was something dangerous in his tone, in the glitter of his eyes. 

“Hang on now,” the Bull said, raising his hands in protest. “You never reacted to _ my _ name. I thought maybe it was a mistake, that you weren’t the right Dorian Pavus. I mean, why didn’t _ you _ever mention it, if you do have my name written somewhere?”

Dorian pressed his lips together into a tight smile. He got to his feet, and took a few steps back towards the open door, but instead of going out through it, he just leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms around his chest.

“Two seven one zero five three six,” he said, the numbers rattled off with the confident cadence of something long memorized despite the closed off defensiveness of his stance.

The Bull lowered his hands. “Ah,” he said.

“Written across my chest,” Dorian said. “No one knew what it was, besides obviously barbaric. Until Alexius. He’d seen Qunari numbers before, but he didn’t know which symbols stood for which numbers. It was my first research assignment from him.”

“You showed it to him?” the Bull asked.

“When we met I was not wearing much. Not one of my prouder moments.”

“Right.”

“It _ is _your name, isn’t it?” Dorian asked. The Bull heard an edge of hysteria in his voice. “This will all be terribly embarrassing if it isn’t. More embarrassing, I mean.”

“Yeah, it’s my name,” the Bull said. “The first three numbers are the year I was born.”

“You’re thirty-nine?”

“Yeah,” the Bull said, impressed and letting it show. “Damn, you’re fast with numbers.” And figuring out when the Tamassrans had started counting the calendar.

“And the last four?”

“What number I was in the order of babies born that year. Most of the time the total number stays about the same, so you can guess someone’s birthday from their number,” though the word ‘birthday’ had no Qunlat equivalent, “ but I was part of a big batch, because there was going to be a big military offensive twenty years later.”

Dorian raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “You plan it out that far ahead of time?”

“Sure.” The Bull shrugged. It was a good motion. Calmed people down. Dorian felt like some skittish animal on the edge of flight. 

“Well,” Dorian said. “There’s one great mystery of my life solved.” He didn’t sound very happy about it, despite that tight smile.

“How did you feel about that?” the Bull said. “Having Qunari numbers on you?” Maybe too blunt a question, too easy to interpret as hostile, but he needed a handle on Dorian, he needed the key that would unlock the mystery of Dorian Pavus’s behavior for him. Things felt too unsteady right now.

Dorian’s smile didn’t change. “How did you feel about having an Altus name on you?”

“Didn’t actually know you were an Altus,” the Bull prevaricated. “Couldn’t tell one Tevinter name from another. Still pretty bad at it, actually.”

“I’m terribly offended,” Dorian said, and it both was a joke and wasn’t, the Bull caught that much. “You never tried to look me up?”

For the first time, the Bull felt the true edge of how uncomfortable the situation was. He had a full name. Dorian had only a string of numbers. 

“Figured it’d happen when it was supposed to,” he said, hoping he hadn’t missed a beat. That was what the Bull would say. The Bull was sentimental, and slightly superstitious. _ Don’t jinx it, Krem_, he’d growl when the boys got too optimistic before a mission.

That was the point of building characters over time. You had a base of material to draw from. 

“I see,” Dorian said. “Well, it’s happened. What shall we do about it?”

The Bull had been thinking skittish deer, but now Dorian’s pose reframed itself in his mind- snake, on the edge of striking or fleeing. The Bull needed to defuse the tension, and his usual template worked fine most of the time, so he went to it. 

“I’m down for whatever you want,” he said. Didn’t pitch it quite as sexy as usual, but the offer was there in the vibration. “We can talk about it, or we can fuck like we were planning to, or you can walk out that door and no hard feelings. I know it’s a weird situation. You want to just pretend this conversation never happened, I won’t make things awkward.”

“How terribly romantic of you,” Dorian said. Spat, really. He turned sharply, without looking back, and walked out the door. The Bull could hear his tread, going down the stairs.

The Bull sat on the bed, trying to tell himself the sinking feeling in his gut was from potentially screwing up inner circle dynamics.

Shit.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bull contemplates things, has some dreams, and gets a surprise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaagh I'm sorry this took so long. It was probably the hardest to write; the next chapter is like 80% written already so it shouldn't take anywhere near as long to get up. There'll probably be an epilogue of some sort after that, too. 
> 
> I feel I should probably content warn for: Bull considers having transactional sex in this chapter, displays some unhealthy attitudes re his own consent.
> 
> I tried to keep my Inquisitor very neutral in previous chapters but realized that wasn't going to work forever because they and Bull need to have an actual relationship for this fic to work. So... they're a Solasmancing nonbinary mage Lavellan, but those facts probably won't come up too often.

He remembered the sound of Dorian walking down the stairs, and he thought he must have waited a while to give him time to clear the area before going down himself, but he couldn’t really remember what happened between that moment and Krem finding him in the back room of the Herald’s rest. 

“You don’t need to give me the gory details, Chief,” Krem said. “In fact, please don’t. You say you fucked up, I believe you. Just go easy on the ale, all right? I’m not dragging your ass upstairs if you keel over.”

The Bull smiled a little at that. Good old Krem, looking out for him. He was right. With his size and metabolism, the Bull shouldn’t have had to worry about making himself sick with drink, but for some reason it was just really hard to judge portions of things when they weren’t handed to you by a dispenser with a stamp for your ration card. He’d made himself sick just eating little cakes at more than one Orlesian party, and Krem knew that, too. 

“You’re a good man, Kremsicle,” he told his lieutenant fondly. “For a Vinty little bastard.”

“That’s me,” Krem said, with a sigh. Rocky handed him another drink, which he downed with the appearance of great gratitude.

“It’s gonna be awkward,” the Bull said to his ale. “He likes coming in here, and now I’ve ruined that. Maybe you could tell him I’ll clear out on weekends.”

“We’re not really that closely acquainted, Chief.”

“I’ll ask Solas,” the Bull said, and tried to get up. 

“I’m not carrying him upstairs,” Rocky said to Krem, somewhere up above the Bull’s line of sight. Wasn’t often he had Rocky above him. Should enjoy the moment while it lasted. Shit, that sounded dirty and he hadn’t even meant it to. 

“He’s so pretty, Krem,” he heard himself say.

“Who, Solas?” Rocky sounded contemplative. “Nah, no hair anywhere.”

“Not Solas,” the Bull said.

“I know,” Krem told him, and patted his shoulder.

Something hurt, deep in his chest, but the ache was fuzzy with the alcohol, and there was nothing that had to be done, right now. No responsibilities. Just him and the comforting pressure of the floor. 

“If I go to bed,” Krem was saying, “can I trust you not to choke and die on your own vomit?” 

The Bull managed to wave a hand. It felt made of lead. 

He felt Krem kneel down and carefully unstrap his leg brace. A small enough thing, for Krem to do, but it took him a couple of minutes, working at the leather straps, making sure the Bull’s leg wasn’t painfully cramped in the morning. The Bull wanted to-

He wanted to-

He wasn’t sure. His thoughts were fuzzy, too. 

“Sleep well, Chief,” Krem said. “If I have a hangover in the morning I’m going to kill you.”

Fair enough. 

_ “Two seven one, zero five three six,” Vasaad repeated. The tip of his finger continued tracing a lazy path along the syllobograms of his signature, across the curve of Hissrad’s arm. “You’re older than me! Wouldn’t have guessed from that babyface.” His finger paused, lifted to jab Hissrad in the cheek. Hissrad pushed it away good-naturedly. Vasaad’s weight was warm on his chest. Outside the hexagon walls of the barracks, hurricane rains battered the city. They drowned out the quiet noises of the other Ben-Hassrath moving and talking in the other rooms of the barracks building. A constant thunder of water, washing away the blood and grime. Hurricane season always killed a lot of livestock and a couple of fisherfolk, and he hated that, but he liked the break in his own duties, the lull in murders and terrorism and sabotage. He liked being in the hammock that was almost too small for him to begin with, made smaller by Vasaad’s added mass. _

_ “Did they call you the whole thing at school? Zero five three six? I was usually just Five Eight in lower half, but then when I was twelve there was another five eight in my group so I had to be eleven five eight.” _

_ “Where was your school?” Hissrad asked. _

_ “South. Near Panandar. There was a lake nearby. What about you?” _

_ “Couple days’ walk outside the capitol. We saw a lot of traffic go by on the main road.” _

_ “Would have been weird,” Vasaad said. _

_ “What?” Hissrad asked. _

_ “If we’d met as children. I wonder if I’d have recognized my writing here, if I’d never even written that word before.” _

_ Hissrad grunted. It felt good to lie still. _

_ “You think you would have recognized yours? Was your writing so obnoxiously neat when you were a little imekari?” _

_ “You’re so touchy feely, I’m sure we would have found out eventually,” Hissrad said, mostly to shut him up. Vasaad had a tendency to babble if he wasn’t stopped. Generally what he babbled about was nonsense, and this wasn’t an exception. _

_ “Your hair smells amazing,” Vasaad said. _

_ Hissrad almost cracked a joke about how his second in command obviously needed to be seeing the Tamassrans a lot more, but when he opened his mouth nothing came out. Vasaad’s fingers had moved, were now twisting the end of Hissrad’s braid. Hissrad felt a little shocked, almost guilty, at how much he didn’t want this moment to stop. Can’t it just be like this. No pain. No lies. Just me and him. _

  


He woke, and braced himself for the pain, but it didn’t come. Not even the normal, background pains- the ache of scar tissue in the cold morning air of Skyhold, the twinge in his bad knee. Nothing. Seemed like a bad sign, until he cracked open his eye and saw the silhouette of horns, and felt the gentle pressure on his brow. 

“Good morning, Iron Bull,” Vivienne de Fer said. 

“Good morning, ma’am,” the Bull mumbled. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen Viv step foot into the Herald’s Rest. It seemed unlikely. That made him wonder if he was even still in the tavern. He wouldn’t put it past her to have floated him up to her loft. But no, that ceiling was very familiar. He could even see the arrow nicks in the beams from the night Sera had finally gotten Leliana to come in for a drink. 

“I believe the bartender wishes you to depart, so his customers may walk across this floor without tripping over you, my dear,” Vivienne said. 

“Oh,” the Bull said. “Right.” He blinked a couple of times, and tilted his head as much as he could with his horns banging against the floor. Vivienne’s face came into view. He winced. The big show of subservience he made to her when they were on missions together was mostly just for her benefit; she was too political, too self-contained, for him to ever really mistake her for a Tamassran. But her cool air of judgement, and the tall horns of her Orlesian hat looming over him, made him feel about six years old again. 

_ Tama, why couldn’t you be here? I know you could explain this whole Dorian thing to me, no problem. _

_ That _was the thought that made him so embarrassed at himself that he gritted his teeth and hauled himself upright, swaying as blood rushed from his head and his skull ached. 

Vivienne handed him a beautiful glass goblet, full to the brim with a transparent liquid. Some part of the Bull’s brain was functioning enough to send up a red flag-_ ding! Test! _He took it from her gently, carefully, despite the dizziness and the increasing pain in his head, and managed to sip from it without spilling any of the liquid, which turned out to be water, chilled to a perfect temperature. She inclined her head in approval as she accepted it back, and then turned and walked elegantly out of the tavern. 

Viv’s games were fun, normally, but right now the Bull just wanted to go dunk his head in a snowbank for a few hours. He sighed. His leg brace was on the table next to where he’d been lying. He took a few moments to strap it on, and followed her out of the tavern.

Vivienne’s balcony off the main tower was a little too close to the library, and Dorian, for the Bull to feel comfortable, but she’d gone to the trouble of bringing in a chair big enough for him to sit on, and she served him a plate of little pink cakes, which made him feel a lot more positive towards her. She even asked him a few polite questions about his boys before she got around to digging her claws in, though he guessed she wasn't particularly interested in the lives of a bunch of unwashed mercenaries. 

Still, it was clear when she decided to get to the point. “I’d never dream of overstepping my bounds, my dear,” she said, leaning forward in the chair that she sat in like a throne, “but am I correct in my conclusion that you and Dorian have had some sort of falling-out?”

She was good. He’d observed that before, admired how she managed to stay well-informed on everything that went on under Skyhold’s shining roofs, considering he was pretty sure she didn’t have any agents assisting her and she rarely entered the tavern or mess hall. Right now, though, he wished she wasn’t quite so talented at piecing together scraps of observation.

He let himself blush, looked away from her eyes. “That’s correct, ma’am. It’s just an awkward personal thing.” 

“Hmm,” Vivienne said. “Darling, I know Dorian likes to imagine he is in possession of some sort of mystique, but he’s really quite transparent to someone with my experience of mages with more confidence than sense. I do not believe he would intentionally harm an ally, but I’m sure we both know how innocently cruel a friend can be. If you would like assistance in deciphering his behavior, I am at your disposal.”

His first reaction, happening somewhere very far away from his face, was distant amusement that she thought she understood magisters better than he did. Which of them was it who’d actually been a slave of a magister, if only for a brief time? Which of them had seen what magisters could do in a place they considered ‘uncivilized’, where even the restraints of their own laws and customs did not apply? So he thought to brush her off, with the slightly stupider than normal version of The Iron Bull he usually put in front of her. 

But he took a bite of one of the little cakes, to give himself more time to compose his response, and the intensity of its sweetness hit him, that taste of decadence that he’d never known inside the Qun, and he thought, _ pink _. She’d chosen his favorite color. She’d gone to much more trouble than was reasonable, simply to collect gossip that might or might not have an eventual payoff. 

It was like his view shifted, with the taste of sugar, and he saw the truth, suddenly. This wasn’t her keeping herself amused with her own miniature version of the Game she loved so much. This was her actually being concerned for the Bull’s well-being. 

That made him feel a bit squishy inside. Viv could be sweet as a cake, underneath all that armor-hard persona. Like some of the stricter tamassrans, who never smiled but would still sneak extra dessert to a crying imekari. 

Well, why not take her up on the offer? She was right, now that he was actually thinking about it. He hadn’t really been exaggerating much, when he flattered her by asking for explanations of the Game, the Orlesian Court, the ways southern nobles danced and drank and fucked each other over. He didn’t really get that stuff and he never would, not the way she did. 

“Thank you, ma’am, I’d appreciate that a lot,” he said. “I think maybe Dorian and I had a bit of a cultural misunderstanding.” He hesitated for a moment, trying to decide how much was his to tell her, how much would be unfair to Dorian. “Do you have experience with, uh, romance, ma’am?”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then stood, and walked to the edge of the balcony, resting her arms on the marble ballustrade. He stood up himself, muscles protesting a little, and joined her. The breeze blew icy cold off the mountainside, soothing his hangover. 

“I’ve had the name of an Orlesian duke on my skin all my life,” she said, looking out at the snow. “I always knew we had the potential to become lovers. But everything else-” Her hand tightened on the balcony. “Everything else I chose for myself. Don’t underestimate the power of that, my dear. Of choosing, and being chosen. Dorian’s main difficulty, I suspect, is that he generally fails to see the full range of choices before him; but you, I think, often don’t perceive any choices at all.”

The Iron Bull took a sip of his tea. Holding the tiny cup the way she’d shown him took some concentration, and allowed him to avoid her cool gaze. 

“Dorian wants to be chosen,” Vivienne said. “Chosen for who he is, instead of what he is. He could have found that at home, if he’d been more intelligent about it; but I do understand why he chose exile.” 

_ If he’d stayed at home, _ the Iron Bull thought, _ we’d never have met. _ It wasn’t a fun thought. Again he was confronted with the knowledge that even if he never won back Dorian’s tentative friendship, he was glad that Dorian had come to Fereldan, that the Bull knew what it looked like when he laughed, the crease in his forehead when he was concentrating on a book, the pleasant sound of his voice.

Shit. 

“You could do worse than him,” Vivienne said, dispassionately. “He’s at least half as clever as he thinks he is, and as foreign barbarians go, he’s not the worst-mannered. But he _ will _return to Tevinter eventually, my dear. Be careful with your heart.”

The Bull almost laughed, but instead he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Vivienne took a sip of her own tea, movements effortlessly elegant, and said, “Was there anything else?”

“Um,” the Bull said. “Maybe. I’ve, uh. I’ve been having these dreams, lately.”

Descending the stairs, he thought about stopping by Solas’s room, leaving that message for Dorian about the tavern. In the end he decided that felt too juvenile; Dorian might think he was being condescended to. He stopped by Josie’s desk instead. 

“Iron Bull!” she said, smiling up at him, and he felt himself relax a little. 

“Hey,” he said. “Was wondering if you had any jobs for my guys. Not that they’re not enjoying construction duty, but they’re gonna get rusty if they’re out of the field too long.” 

“In fact, I do!” Josephine said. “Baroness Merise de Montfort reports bandit incursions onto her lands, and requests the assistance of the Inquisition. She requested you specifically by name,” and Josephine’s eyebrows waggled in innuendo that was somehow innocent. 

The Bull felt a tightness in his chest, and for a moment he couldn’t figure out why. Sure, bandits weren’t the best time- they were too much like Tal-Vashoth- but it’d probably be over fast, and then his boys would get the best hospitality he could finagle for them, and while nobles weren’t always the best in the sack, they were usually kinky enough to make things interesting. 

It was the conversation with Vivienne, he realized. The suggestion that he didn’t make his own choices, he just let things happen to him. 

He shook his head to clear it. He’d been hired to do a job. It was his responsibility to do it. 

“Sounds like fun,” he said. “You’ve got the details for me?”

She did. They included a detailed schedule. The Chargers would be leaving in the morning. 

It was probably for the best. This would give both him and Dorian some time and space to cool down, get their emotions out of the way, think about how they wanted to handle things. 

He checked in with the boss before they left, just to make sure everything was tidy. Climbing the stairs to the topmost room, he heard two voices, arguing, but as he got higher the sound turned into only one voice, strident and distressed and very familiar.

“-I do appreciate your assistance with my father, very much, but this is a part of my personal life I would prefer to stay personal, thank you. I was somewhat emotionally compromised yesterday and did something rash, that’s all there is to it.”

The Bull tried to step even harder on the stairs, and coughed as he came up into the wide, well- lit room. Dorian stared at him, and then looked away. The boss raised an eyebrow. 

“Hey boss,” the Bull said. “Just wanted to let you know Josie’s sending me and the boys out to do a thing for her tomorrow. We shouldn’t be gone more than a week.” 

“Oh,” the boss said. “Thank you for telling me.” 

“Excuse me,” Dorian said, and moved towards the stairwell. The Bull shifted out of the way so there was no danger of their shoulders brushing as Dorian passed him. 

Lavellan sighed. 

“Sorry,” the Bull said. “I guess that was awkward.” 

“A little.”

When the Bull had first started hearing stories of what had happened at the Conclave, they’d been confused, distorted rumors. Andraste’s chosen was a human woman, golden-haired like the prophet herself, a mage who’d turned from her kind to protect the common folk. No, the Herald was a horned giant, gifted the power of speech along with a magic sword. (That version didn’t often make its way directly to the Iron Bull’s pointy ears.) The stories couldn’t even agree if the Herald was a man or a woman.

“Like those are the only options,” Dalish had snorted into her ale, and then grown embarrassed and awkward when the others had asked her what she meant. Some clans of Dalish, she had tried her best to explain, had more than two gender roles for their people. “I can’t really tell you more than that,” Dalish said. “Secret stuff. Not every clan even does it. The ones that do say it’s a sign of magical talent, so maybe this Herald is a Dalish mage, that’s all I’m saying.” She’d won three silvers off of Rocky later, betting on it. 

“What about the Qunari?” Skinner had asked, the question holding a slight edge, a challenge, the way every question did, from Skinner. “They have something like that?”

The Bull had made a joke and changed the topic. He usually didn’t mind talking about life under the Qun, but he didn’t want to have to explain that Qunlat had three genders, all right, but the third was for _ things_.

For _ bas_. 

Being hired by the Inquisition hadn’t much clarified how he should be referring to his employer. Most of the Inquisition talked about Lord Lavellan, when they didn’t refer to the elf simply as “Worship”, but Cassandra and most of the priests went for ‘Lady’. The Bull had never been any good at picking up on the genders of elves visually, particularly the Dalish, who signaled their various roles in ways much different from the other bas. He’d enquired, as delicately as he could, and been told the Inquisitor didn’t much care which form of address was used. Which was fair enough. 

The Bull suspected that ambiguity was something the Inquisitor enjoyed. They were skillful at deflecting any direct questions about their religious beliefs, rarely expressed strong political opinions on anything outside the war room, avoided using magic in public, and dressed almost entirely in dark grays and blues. 

Their room, though, displayed everything usually kept scrupulously hidden, with its stained glass windows in Dalish patterns of trees, the equally Dalish patterns on the linens, and the shelves lined with books and magical paraphernalia. The Bull had only seen this room once before, when the boss had invited him up for a post-battle combat tactics discussion and a bottle of brandy. 

“So what’s this thing you’re doing?” the boss asked, and the Bull explained.

Lavellan nodded. “Well, I’ll miss you, but we’re still a good month away from assaulting Adamant. I can spare you for the moment. Just don’t get yourself injured fighting bandits.”

“I’ll do my best, boss.”

“Look,” Lavellan said, “I don’t mean to pry, but are you and Dorian going to be all right? I don’t know the details, but I consider you both my friends, and I’ll help any way that I can.”

The Bull blinked. Friends. That made sense, he guessed. They’d drank together, fought together. Lavellan had met the boys, and once a fortnight they’d sneak out of their tower in disguise and join the Bull in wandering the camps. People had called the Bull a friend after less. But he’d never stayed in one place this long before. Maybe that was why it felt different. 

There wasn’t really a word for ‘friend’, in Qunlat, not one that meant the same thing as the Common word. There was your unit, the people you worked with, who were part of you and you were part of them. And there were your _ kadan _. More than just those with their names on your skin, but not many more. 

_Be careful with your heart,_ Vivienne had said, and he'd wanted to laugh, but that was what _kadan_ meant, literally. Where your heart was. 

The _ bas _had a lot more roles than the Qun did. A lot more. And so many of them were so uncertainly defined. Leader. Lover. Partner. Friend. 

“We can sort it out on our own,” he said. “But thanks for offering, I appreciate it.” 

“All right,” Lavellan said, and smiled. “I hope you do work it out. You both deserve to find happiness.”

_ Bit of a romantic, the Inquisitor _, the Bull thought, filing that information away as he headed back down the staircase.

Halfway down he stopped. Dorian was leaning against the wall, half in and half out of one of the beams of sunlight pouring through the high stained glass windows. 

“I was rude, last night,” Dorian said, the words short and rushed. There was a pause, after he said them. Dust motes danced in the shafts of light.

“It’s okay,” the Bull said. “You had reason to be.”

Dorian snorted. “You say that,” he said, “but I’m not convinced you actually understand my reasons at all.”

The Bull shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll try my best, though, if you want to explain it to me.”

Silence again, as Dorian looked at him. His face for a moment was more open and vulnerable than the Bull had ever seen it, and the Bull felt an urge to reach out to him, so strong in that moment that he couldn’t even follow it, just felt it rolling over him like a tidal wave. 

Then Dorian looked away. 

“No,” he said, artificially light, “don’t worry yourself over it. We’re simply too different, I think. It isn’t your fault.”

“Dorian,” the Bull said. 

“Enjoy yourself on your trip,” Dorian said. “I must get back to skulking around the library. I’ve almost got the five books in Tevene organized the way I want them.” 

But he didn’t move, just stood there until the Bull said, “Okay,” and moved carefully around him. The Bull felt the weight of Dorian’s gaze as he went down the rest of the stairs. 

The Baroness’s lands were three days’ ride from Skyhold. The Bull felt his spirits lift as the Chargers crossed the great bridge and headed out into the main valley. The air was cold and sharp, and the sun was so bright on the snow it was almost blinding, but the horses had blinders on and picked their way placidly down the well-trodden road. Inquisition soldiers and scouts saluted them as they passed.

“Oh, good, you’re feeling better,” Krem said, his Imperial warmblood gelding drawing up alongside the Bull’s enormous draft horse. “Not used to you feeling down for so long. I was almost about to start hitting you with the stick, and you know I hate that thing.” 

“It’s good for your arm muscles,” the Bull said automatically. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

“I heard you’re having romantic troubles,” someone said behind them, far too loudly. The Bull turned his head to see Dalish, perched on her tiny, hardy little pony, her ‘bow’ across the pommel of her saddle ready to whack the unwary rider in the shins. 

The Bull rolled his eye. “You’re all a bunch of horrible gossips. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Leave him alone,” Krem told her. “Not all of us have our soulmates literally fall into our laps.” 

Like clockwork the Bull heard an Orlesian-accented shout from the back. “It didn’t happen like that!” 

He felt his mouth bending into a smile. It was good to be out with his boys. 

The ride down from the mountains was always interesting, snow giving way to various versions of Southern forest, mountains turning to hills turning to fields. The landscape of southern Orlais was familiar by this point, and some of the villages they passed through even knew them, people stopping in their work to cheer and press them with gifts and provisions that the Bull turned down with a smile. 

On the edge of the baroness’s lands they came to a village that had been burned.

“Okay, no time to check in first,” the Bull said, after he’d sent a runner to the Baroness and assigned ten men to corpse cremation duty. “We’re hunting bandits.” 

It was grim work, and one of the newer guys got an arrow in the leg, but Stitches said she would keep it, though she’d walk with a limp for the rest of her life. The Bull let her know there was still a place for her in the Chargers with the archers, or they’d give her a good enough pension to set her up with other work. “Between us and the Inquisition, you’re in good hands,” he said to the woman- Basher, he’d been calling her- and she burst into tears. It was a lot better than watching a Chantry priest do the rites for the departed. 

They headed to the baroness’s manor to give her the news that the bandits were dealt with. The Bull let the boys enjoy being heroes. The baroness put them all up in proper lodging on the grounds of her estate, and gave the Bull and Krem their own rooms in the manor house itself. The Bull watched her interactions with Krem carefully. A couple of times they’d had patrons who thought his lieutenant would make a good exotic toy, and the Bull had diplomatically but firmly redirected them, because Krem deserved better than that. But the Baroness de Montfort seemed entirely focused on the Bull. With her mask on he couldn’t see the heat in her eyes, but it was there in her voice and the way she laughed behind her fan. It was what he’d expected, and he went with it, flirting back outrageously over a truly decadent dinner while Krem made awkward small talk with the lady’s daughter. There was a weird discomfort growing in the pit of the Bull’s stomach, though, and he couldn’t figure it out.

After the food and music, he and Krem were shown to their rooms, which were about as ridiculously luxurious as the Bull had expected. He had to admit the gilt designs on the walls were pretty, though he could leave the portraits of old dead family members. There were places as painted and prettied as this on Par Vollen, but they were public spaces, not a room designed for one person to sleep in. 

He and Krem were playing chess by the fire in his room, and he was kicking Krem’s ass like always, when the messenger arrived with a note from the Baroness and a conspiratorial smile.

Normally at this point Krem rolled his eyes and told the Bull not to break his horns, but this time he frowned. “You okay, Chief?” he asked. “You don’t feel that great.”

“What?” the Bull said. “You’re imagining things. I’m fine.”

“If you’re sure,” Krem said, though he sounded unconvinced. “I’m going for a walk.” It was their outstanding habit, to put some space between each other when one of them was getting frisky. The connection couldn’t be shut off, but distance made it faint enough to be more or less ignorable. 

“Check in on the others, will you?” the Bull asked. “Make sure none of them got put in the stables.” 

He followed the servant down the winding corridors, mentally noting the layout of the place even as the nausea in his stomach grew. He couldn’t figure out why. He’d been doing this kind of thing since the Chargers had first gotten enough fame and respect to attract noble patrons. The patron got a great story to tell their friends, the Chargers got a big bonus and word of mouth advertising, and all it cost was something he enjoyed doing for free all the time. There was nothing different about the Baroness de Montfort. Her people seemed as happy with her as any Orlesian peasants were about their overlords, he hadn’t seen any abuse of the servants, and her lascivious comments about his unusual qualities at dinner hadn’t been any more insulting than the usual. 

_ But you, I think, often don’t perceive any choices at all. _

Oh.

It was weirdly simple, once he’d worked it out. He was still thinking about Dorian, and he didn’t want to have sex with someone else, not right now. But he’d been trying to talk himself into doing it anyway. Because it was what was best for the company, and the company’s needs gave him daily purpose where the Qun no longer did. 

But they had a permanent contract with the Inquisition now. They didn’t need the money. He could turn a job down just because he didn’t feel like doing it, with no better reason than that. 

Having it all reasoned out didn’t make him feel entirely better, but it loosened the knot in his stomach, and when he entered the Baroness’s private study the smile on his face didn’t ache. She poured him a glass of brandy, and he sat carefully in one of her little toothpick chairs and chatted with her about the Inquisition and the current state of Orlesian politics. He didn’t know shit about the second topic but he knew it didn’t matter; he was just indulging her thrill at discussing such things with an uncouth mercenary. She flirted with him and he flirted back, but when she put her glass down and removed her mask he knelt before her chair and brushed his lips across the back of her hand, and explained that while she had a fantastic pair of tits they could sadly never be more than friends, because he’d met his soulmate in the Inquisition and he was the jealous sort.

Her lips had pressed thin with irritated disappointment, but he’d laid it on thick and she was too Orlesian not to enjoy the romance of it all. The possessive lover, the forbidden unconsummated passion… “He is a lucky man,” she told the Bull. 

“You’re too kind, my lady.” 

He told himself if she stiffed them on the payment he’d make it up to the boys out of his own savings, and kept laying on the compliments until the Baroness seemed mollified and he thought it was safe to make his excuses and return to his room. 

Dorian would have found it all hilarious, he thought, and imagining how Dorian would laugh kept him amused as he retraced his steps down the long turns of corridor.

Krem was still out, and the fire had burned low in the Bull’s room. He built it back up, and lay on a too-soft bed. 

He thought about Vivienne, and the way he put versions of himself before her for her enjoyment, and he thought about Dorian, and the numbers on Dorian’s chest. He’d never heard of markings like that, and it unsettled him, far more than it ought to. The idea that whatever bound him to Dorian, it wasn’t the order of the universe- the Qun, or the Maker, or something else- pairing useful tools together. That even if he had never become Ashkaari, become Hissrad, become the Iron Bull, even if he’d become someone else entirely, something about him would still be tied to some part of Dorian. 

Someone who’ll need your help. 

“I’m trying, Tama,” he muttered to the darkness.

_ “Harder,” he grunted, hands tightening into fists. There was a pause, and then Gatt swung at him again, _ Thunk _ . It was no good. Gatt was clearly doing his best, and the kid had no shortage of pent-up rage waiting for any outlet, but he just didn’t have the muscle to get a solid hit in. _

_ “Again,” he said, nevertheless. _

_ Someone entered the courtyard, with a loud bang of the gate. Vasaad. He looked pissed. He often looked pissed these days, though. “Give it up, kid,” he said, grabbing the stick from Gatt’s hands. Gatt gave him a look that ought to have cooked him dead on the spot, but unfortunately it came from somewhere around Vasaad's waist, and the Qunari didn’t even notice. His hand absently ruffled Gatt’s hair. “Now clear out.” _

_ “Hissrad-” Gatt started. _

_ “Yeah, go on,” Hissrad muttered. He was finally starting to feel the sting on his arms, but distantly. _

_ Gatt muttered a Tevene profanity and stomped angrily into the building. Koslun, he was such a _ kid _ still. He should be in school or something. Yeah, yeah, he was the same age every Qunari was when they got their assignment, but even when he’d been in school in Alam he hadn’t known peace and safety like Hissrad had, when he was a kid. Everyone deserved some kind of break from the endless shit of life. _

_ “What is this?” Vasaad asked, grabbing Hissrad’s arms. Hissrad winced a little as Vasaad’s fingers dug into skin that was starting to purple. The discomfort, though, was less from the pain and more from the rage he could feel boiling beneath Vasaad’s skin. _

_ “Sorry,” Hissrad said. “Did I hurt you?” _

_ Vasaad shook his head, the beads at the end of each braid clinking against each other. “Only enough to tell me you were doing something stupid. Why are you doing this? She was helping the Tal-Vashoth. That makes her Tal-Vashoth too.” _

_ “No,” Hissrad said. “She wasn’t crazy. She was just scared. She just wanted to be left alone.” He could still see the terror in the woman’s eyes, and feel the way her small human bones had crunched under his axe. He should have found a way to take her in to the reeducators alive, but he’d also known she wouldn’t see that as mercy. _

_ He felt it when Vasaad’s anger transmuted into something else, a change so quick and vast it reached past the fog to touch him, like a change in the tides. He felt Vasaad’s hands when they left his arms and came to rest on the sides of his face. _

_ “I won’t lose you to this,” Vasaad said, and brought their foreheads together, not gently but not violently either. His thumbs smoothed circles on Hissrad’s skin, the stubble of his cheeks. _

_ Hissrad brought his own hands up. He could cover Vasaad’s hands entirely with his own. _Your size and strength are tools, Ashkaari. 

_ “You won’t,” he said. “I promise.” _

  
  


The Bull woke sweating, the fancy velvet sheets sticking to his bare skin. He lay in bed, unable to move, for some uncountable stretch of time. He knew without looking at the sky that it was the dead hours of night, nothing else moving in the manor or on the grounds.

The Fade often reflected memories, Vivienne had told him. As long as nothing changed in the memory, it wasn’t something he should worry about. And even then, as long as he was careful not to agree to anything a figure from his memories might ask him for, he should be safe.

“Though your vigilance does you credit, my dear,” she had added. “It’s entirely possible to get lost in the past, and lose your sense of yourself.”

The Bull went over the memory, trying to think if the promise he’d made to Vasaad would have any value to a demon. It couldn’t, not that he could think of. But he didn’t know shit about demons. 

He’d dreamed when he was a child, probably. Most children did. But he didn’t remember them. He’d started learning the meditations before he learned to read. 

There’d been things like dreams on Seheron, towards the end, but they’d come during the day, too, and often felt more like hallucinations. He’d never mentioned them to the Tamassrans. He’d told the reeducators, though, and they’d said it was asala-taar and done things to him to fix it. And that had been that, mostly, until he’d touched a Vint deserter and started getting occasional echoes of human dreams.

But nothing vivid like this. 

He lay in bed sweating for another few hours. Once he heard the first cock crow, he got up and wandered down to the kitchens, where the first servants were up making bread. He chatted with them for a while, and got some sweet treats for his trouble.Then he wandered through the house, and ended up in a library. The smell of the books was comforting. He let his eyes trail over the covers, and they snagged on one, the title on its spine in a version of Tevene he couldn’t read. He slid it off the shelf, and opened it carefully. It looked quite old, and there were drawings inside, sketches of what looked like buildings. 

He could see Dorian holding this book. He could see Dorian looking up and saying, _ “We’re simply too different,” _ in that horribly light tone.

Had he meant it? Or was there something the Bull was missing? 

He didn’t know, but he hoped there was.

Dreams aside, there were parts of his life that were dead, and not coming back. He hadn’t received anything from Par Vollen at all since the terse acknowledgement of his plan to join the Inquisition. His life now was as it had been for the last ten years. Krem and the Chargers, taverns and parties and camps on the road. He wasn’t sure Dorian could fit into that life, but it was at least worth giving it a try. No one was going to tell him off for trying. 

He felt himself smiling at the book, a little. He tucked it under his arm and headed back through the maze of corridors and staircases.

On the second staircase a small elven servant bumped into him.

“Message for you, Hissrad,” she said, in Qunlat, and handed him a leather-wrapped package. 

_ Shit, you startled me, _ he wanted to say, but didn’t. Just took the package from her. 

He probably should have waited until they were on the road to open it, but it felt heavy in his hand, and as soon as he was back in his opulent room he sat on the too-soft bed and unwound the cord that wrapped it. Inside the leather was a thick sheaf of paper. The topmost leaf was addressed to him. The first few lines written on it were very short.

_ Hissrad, _

_ Your reports have been received. The threat is enough. _

_ The Qun permits an alliance of interests. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Bull's past catches up to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out I really don't have a good sense for how many chapters a fic is going to take. In my defense, this is pretty much my first real longfic, and I'm figuring a few things out as I go along. But at this point it'd be silly for me to promise for certain that there's only going to be two more chapters, so uh, it'll be as long as it'll be I guess.
> 
> Disassociation cw for this chapter.

The ride back to Skyhold was uncomfortable. He could feel Krem, vividly. He could feel Krem’s concern, for him. Like a hammering on the back of his skull.

Bull showed Krem the package, the second night. He probably really shouldn’t have, but, well. Asit tal-eb. He had to translate the letter on the top, but the pages underneath were in Common. Folders of information on Venatori lyrium smuggling.

“This is good, right?” Krem had said, after the Bull had explained. “This is why you were writing to them. So they’d help stop the end of the world.”

“Yeah,” the Bull had said. “Yeah, it’s good.”

The third night, he’d lain awake in his tent going over and over the operation description included in the package, and muttering “alliance of interests” to himself. 

Things got a bit better on the fourth day, when they rode back through Skyhold’s gates. Once they were home, he found himself thinking. Every corner of the fortress was known and familiar. He still didn’t sleep much. Thinking about red lyrium flowing into Minrathous, and monsters flowing out. Seheron’s streets growing red crystals out of brick and bone. 

The bone-jarring vibration of Krem’s shield slamming into his brought him back to himself. To the smell of cold mud and torn grass and sweat. Morning in Skyhold. Nothing like Seheron.

He’d expected training with Krem to be weird, back when they’d first started, but it wasn’t really. Krem couldn’t anticipate him the way Vasaad had been able to once, and the Bull for his part had to rely on Krem’s visual tells. He could kind of feel it when he gave Krem bruises, but only kind of. Sometimes he idly wondered what it would have been like if Krem had ever wanted to ‘ride the Bull’, but he usually figured it probably wouldn’t have been anything mindblowing.

Over Krem’s head he could see the Inquisitor approaching through the mud. He didn’t react, kept his focus on Krem’s shield, knocked it aside for a fourth time.

“Ah, come on Krem, I’m working my ass off trying to get you to see that move!”

“You’ve still got plenty of ass left, Chief.” Krem’s attention turned as he noticed the Inquisitor’s approach. Still that flicker of awe every time. “Ah, your worship.”

The Inquisitor was reassuringly easy to read, awkward hint of a smile, fidgeting fingers. “Hey,” they said. “How’s it going?”

Checking in. Probably still worried about the thing with him and Dorian. The Bull had never envied the Inquisitor their position. The last time Skinner and Dalish had gotten pissed enough at each other that it had been affecting the company, the Bull had just patted them both on the shoulders and told them he was cutting off their bar tabs until they worked out their shit. 

Maybe this awkwardness with Dorian was useful in the end, though, if it got the Inquisitor coming to him. Set things up better than if he’d had to track them down. 

“Glad you came by. Got a letter from my contacts in the Ben-Hassrath. Already verified it with Red.”

That had been fun. Out of the whole Inquisition, Leliana reminded him the most of people he’d known in another life. If she’d been born on Par Vollen she might have been running the whole Dangerous Questions branch of the Ben-Hassrath by now, with that cold violence in her eyes and the fervent purpose in her voice. 

Should have made him feel more comfortable with her, maybe. She was something he understood, could predict.

It didn’t. 

Lavellan’s eyes flicked to Krem. 

“Not hiding anything from my boys,” the Bull said, a little irritated. “Besides, right now I need to hit something.”

Felt a hint of Krem’s concern again. “You know they’ve got training dummies, Chief.”

“The training dummy might actually defend itself against the shield bash. Anyway, the Ben-Hassrath letter…”

Lavellan raised an eyebrow.

“The Ben-Hassrath have been reading my reports. They don’t like Corypheus or his Venatori. And they really don’t like red lyrium.”

Lavellan heard out the offer. It was a good thing, really, that the Bull was working for a Dalish elf who had never had reason to think much about the Qunari. 

Movement, out of the corner of his blind spot. The Bull shifted slightly, identified it. Dorian, picking his way through the mud. Crap. The Bull had planned on making this pitch to the Inquisitor and the Inquisitor alone. None of the Inquisition were particularly fond of the Qunari in general, and Dorian in particular had a lot of reason to be suspicious of the offer. It’d really suck if old grudges got in the way of teaming up to kick Corypheus’s ass.

Because the offer was legitimate. 

This was an important opportunity, and he couldn’t fuck this up with his own bad handling of something unrelated.

Out of the corner of his eye, the Bull watched Dorian lean against one of stone walls, eavesdropping and pretending that he wasn’t. 

“All right,” the Inquisitor said. “I’m still bringing backup, though.”

“I’ll go,” Dorian said, not loudly but it was still oddly startling, like he’d gotten closer than the Bull had realized. Lavellan turned slightly but didn’t seem shocked by his interjection. Dorian was looking at Lavellan, not the Bull. 

“That’s okay,” the Bull said. “We’ve got a mage.”

“Dalish is wonderful,” Dorian said, “if inclined to drag that ‘bow’ joke out a bit too long- but she’s not _ me._”

The Bull had to admit that was true. Dalish was a good soldier, as effective in a fight as Krem with his maul and as handy as Stitches and his poultices. Dorian was a force of nature. 

_ Dangerous thing _. But so were dragons. And the Bull had always in part of his soul believed the old joke that his ancestors had fucked dragons, right? So it totally wasn’t weird that thinking about how Dorian could set a squad of footsoldiers on fire with his mind got the Bull more excited than frightened. 

It maybe was a bit weird and bad that he was still thinking about stuff like that after Dorian had clearly turned him down, but- ugh, it was better than pointlessly worrying about the mission. Or about what it meant that Dorian was doing this.

“It’s the Storm Coast,” Lavellan pointed out. “You didn’t seem to enjoy it the last time we were there.”

Dorian shrugged, elegantly, like a cat. “What can I say? I’m going a little stir crazy.” 

Lavellan hesitated, and then nodded. “All right.”

So that was that. The mission was a go. Which meant the Bull had to get his shit together. That was his job, that was what he gave to Krem: stability. The confidence that their connection wouldn’t fatally distract Krem during battle. The Bull had seen too many pairs that didn’t manage it well. He’d taken advantage on a number of occasions, guessed that two opponents were bonded and hit one to get to the other, although mostly he’d done that on Seheron. Even in his own band, he and Krem developed tactics that kept Dalish and Skinner on separate sides of the field. But he and Krem were the exception. They were good, using their connection to signal retreats and give updates but perfectly capable of both being in the van at once. 

Maybe that was because of the gray on Krem’s back, the way their connection didn’t seem to be as intense as some. Maybe it was because the Bull was very well trained to block out pain or fear during combat. Whatever the reason, the whole company depended on them _ working _. 

Which meant the Bull had to _ get his shit together. _

The Chargers accepted the mission brief like it was any other assignment. He supposed to them it was. For them, he was their one point of reference on the Qun. They saw it as just another nation, like Orlais or Fereldan. He’d worked hard to make that happen. So it shouldn’t unsettle him now. 

He’d hit things enough for the day. Any more and he’d risk wearing himself out before a long day’s ride tomorrow. He should probably try jerking off, see if that helped with all the tension, but the idea of being alone in his room with that damn stack of paper wasn’t appealing. He could be not alone in his room, finding company wouldn’t be hard, but that hadn’t worked great with the Baroness. So he headed for the Herald’s Rest, and settled himself in his usual corner. Cabot brought him his favorite beer without being asked, which was nice and the Bull resolved to leave an extra tip when he paid off whatever he still owed from the previous week’s stupid bender. 

Instead of just holding the beer and occasionally sipping it, like he usually did, the Bull drank it, and ordered another. But just one, he wasn’t going to end up on the floor again either. Then he waited to start feeling warm and fuzzy. There was the familiar moment of confused panic-_ you’re drunk you’re incapacitated and the barman’s going to take out a dagger and _\- He pushed past it. Drank a bit more of the beer. 

Even though he was deliberately not watching the door, he still noticed the hush that rippled across the tavern. It was a familiar, particular hush, the one that accompanied the distrusted, flamboyant Tevinter nobleman that most of Skyhold still gossiped about. 

He didn’t feel particularly surprised when Dorian slipped into the seat across from him.

“I thought I should perhaps explain myself,” Dorian said.

“That’d be nice,” the Bull said. “Was starting to wonder if I’m getting mixed signals or if I’m just stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” Dorian said. “I have realized that much, at least.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

Dorian snorted. “I just wanted you to know I didn’t insert myself into this little trip of yours out of some kind of- spite, or jealousy, or some other unutterably tedious pettiness. I’m- concerned. About you. I know I’ve abdicated all right to be, so if you tell me to bugger off, I’ll do exactly that.”

The Iron Bull looked at him. Thought about how it would feel to touch his face. “You always have the right to feel whatever you want, Dorian,” he said. 

He wasn’t prepared for the way Dorian’s face reacted to that. The soft emotion in those gorgeous eyes. 

“But,” the Bull said, “this mission is very important. To me, and to the Inquisition. I have to be focused for it. I can’t be distracted.”

Dorian drooped. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll beg Madame de Fer to take my place.”

“You don’t have to do that,” the Bull said. “You’re always welcome along.” Again something deep inside him flinched at the way Dorian’s kohl-lined eyes went wider at the words. “I’m just letting you know I can’t think about anything that’s not my work right now.”

“Work and beer, I see,” Dorian said.

“Yeah.”

Dorian reached out and picked up the Bull’s mug, and drank the last of the liquid in it. “Disgusting,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Well. All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. 

Weirdly enough, when he went to bed half an hour later, he fell right away into a dreamless heavy sleep.

  
  
  
  


It was raining on the coast. Not a surprise, the Bull couldn’t remember ever being in the area when it wasn’t raining, but it was still irritating. It was cold rain, at least, not warm, and the fog that collected in the valleys between hills was thin and wispy.

The meeting point was on a high hill. The Inquisitor followed the Bull without a word and with barely any noise, avoiding puddles and snapping branches like a scout. Sera, almost disappearing under an oiled coat, was not nearly so quiet, and Dorian kept whacking at low hanging branches with his staff. 

“All right,” the Bull said at last, circling around the crown of the hill, surveying the area. View on one side, trees and mountain on the other. “Our Qunari contact should be here to meet us.”

When had he last spoken to another Qunari? The elf woman in the chateau had spoken to him, but that hadn’t been what you’d call a conversation. Of course he’d chatted a bit with Marozia, his handler for the Minrathous mission seven years ago, but there must have been something since then, right? 

He couldn’t remember. 

“He is.”

The Bull’s body tensed in alarm as an elf in camouflage armor faded into view. He must have been hidden in the trees, but the Bull had been staring right at that spot and not seen anything. The elf was small, even as elves went, dark haired with a long nose and an amused expression. The way he was holding himself said Ben-Hassrath scout, and he looked kind of familiar. But it wasn’t until he said, “Good to see you again, Hissrad,” that the pieces clicked together. 

The Bull felt relief flood through him, bursting the dam of his enforced calm. “Gatt,” he said, hearing the pleasure in his voice. It was Gatt. Not some strange unknown Tallis but Gatt, still alive after all these years and looking good. Looking really sharp in that armor, with a dignity and grace he hadn’t had as a child. “Last I heard you were still in Seheron.” 

His superiors had sent him yearly updates on the surviving members of his team, at first. It wasn’t a long list- Gatt, and Baq the cryptologist, and Isskari who’d been in Alam when whole thing happened. Isskari had died in the second year. The third year, he’d been told Baq had been assigned to undercover work too and no further updates would be forthcoming. The fourth year, the update had never come. He’d assumed it was part of the way the Qun had been gradually withdrawing its support, leaving him to do what he liked. 

“They finally decided I’d calmed down enough to go back into the world,” Gatt said, and his smile was wry but there was no painful edge to it. Gatt was actually okay. 

“Boss,” the Bull said, “this is Gatt. We worked together on Seheron.” 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Inquisitor,” Gatt said, but his eyes were scanning past the Inquisitor, taking in the whole group. Someone had trained him properly at some point, done a better job than Hissrad. The Bull watched him size up the Inquisitor, and Sera behind them, peeling the bark off a tree, easy to dismiss for any idiot who didn’t notice the strength in her muscular arms. And next to Sera, Dorian. Looking very Tevinter and very mage, leaning on his ornate staff and staring at Gatt with narrowed eyes. 

“Hissrad’s reports say you’re doing good work,” Gatt said. The Inquisitor looked questioningly at the Bull, who was busy frantically trying to remember if Gatt had ever commented on the Tevinter name on his chest. Stupid thought. Even if Gatt did remember, no reason he would put that together with the fancy ‘Vint standing at the Bull’s shoulder. Even if Gatt and Dorian’s paths had crossed in Tevinter, that would have been nearly two decades ago, when Dorian was a kid himself. If, on the other hand, the Ben-Hassrath had seen fit to tell Gatt, then they’d told him, and there was nothing the Bull could do about it.

“I’m glad. It’s always nice to hear friends say good things about me in their secret spy reports,” the Inquisitor said. Damn, was that a hint of resentment? He’d thought he’d been doing a good job managing the Inquisitor’s suspicions.

“He does. But they aren’t really secret, are they.”

Gatt’s eyes flicked to Dorian, then back.

Crap.

“Look, Gatt-”

“Relax. Unlike our superiors, I know how it works out here.”

So what the fuck did _ that _mean.

All the tension had come back with a vengeance, and nope, he didn’t have time for that, not when the Chargers needed him steady. Stress could be a good warning sign, the first hint that something had gone sideways, but this wasn’t helpful. He took a deep breath, shoved it all aside. 

The rain continued to pour down. 

“We’re in this together,” Gatt said, his eyes conciliatory, maybe an apology for freaking the Bull out. Would be nice to think so. “Tevinter is dangerous enough without the influence of this Venatori cult,” and oh, the way he said it, calm and tranquil as a Tamassran reading scripture. Even the word Tevinter rolling off his tongue without extra spit. The Bull was so proud he could just about burst. 

Dorian wasn’t as happy, though. The Bull was expecting this, braced for it, so he knew his face was impassive, but he winced inwardly as Dorian fluffed up his feathers and went full affronted ‘Vint. His tongue dripping sarcasm like poison. “Yes, we all hate those depraved, uncivilized brutes, don’t we,” he said, and the Bull closed his eye, not wanting to see Gatt stare at Dorian with a lifetime’s worth of hate, the way he’d stared at the body of the first magister he’d killed. “I for one just can’t wait until we’re all under the Qun. Life will be better for everyone, I’m sure.”

The Bull waited for the explosion, but it didn’t come. He opened his eye. Gatt was still calm as a rippleless pond. “It was for me,” he said. 

“I’m sure,” Dorian said. “After all, who needs the freedom to pursue one’s own dreams or choose one’s own partners. Pointless, really.”

“Uh,” the Bull said. “Maybe we should get back to the mission.”

He ignored the way Gatt was looking at him again, with an expression that now was way too close to pity.

  
  
  


Gatt explained the mission. The Bull wasn’t happy. The nausea in his gut was back. Dreadnought run. He’d done too many of those back in the day. Mixed Ben-Hassrath and Beresaad forces. Couple of them he’d been lucky to walk away from. He could still remember the way gaatlok flashed white when a dreadnought went up. The acrid smell of the smoke mixing with blood and salt. 

The Inquisitor wasn’t happy either. He could tell they would have felt better with a full company of Inquisition soldiers, or even the rest of the Chargers. But his instructions had said, only himself and his core team, and he couldn’t argue with the reasoning. Not with anything more substantial than a bad fucking feeling. 

He wanted the Inquisitor to say no, to back out, because sure of course he trusted the Qun and the Ben-Hassrath with the big picture and everything but when it came to the details, bad decisions got made all the time, and he’d been on too many bad dreadnought runs, and he’d always promised his boys he’d turn down any crap jobs. Hadn’t really thought about what it meant, that he could make that promise to them. That their lives were his, not the Qun’s. 

But the Inquisitor just shrugged and said, “All right, let’s get started, then.” 

Of course the force had to split up. And of course the logical division- the one they’d used before, that they’d built strategies around- was Krem in command of the core group, a well rounded strike team of six professionals, and then the Inquisitor leading the second force, smaller but composed of heavy hitter specialists who weren’t so trained to avoid friendly fire. The Bull as the meat, absorbing damage while the three geniuses around him rained down death and destruction. And Gatt would be with them this time, too. The Bull couldn’t lie and say to himself that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing Gatt in action again. 

But… crap.

He went over his mental map of the area. The bad spot was the higher one. He knew there’d be more forces there than Gatt’s information accounted for. Couldn’t have explained to anyone how he knew. It was some combination of experience, instinct, and intuition. 

The second group could take that one, he decided. Maybe he shouldn’t be risking the Inquisitor, but it was the higher powered group. And if things did go south, the Inquisitor could always Fade step out of there, sound the retreat to recall the boys.

He might not be the biggest fan of magic, but he’d put effort into knowing Lavellan and Dorian’s moves. 

He headed back to the clearing where his boys were waiting. They were all standing very sharp and professional, even Skinner, which was weird. It occurred to him that they might be trying to make him look good in front of the Qunari contact, and a sharp ache added itself to the distracting feelings in his gut. Krem listened to him giving the rundown. Was patient when he lingered, telling Krem crap he already knew. Telling him to be careful.

“Yes, I know.” The headache feeling of Krem’s concern at least was gone, replaced with focus on the upcoming battle. At least one of them had his head in the game. Krem’s gaze was warm, fond, indulgent. “Thanks, mother.”

“Qunari don’t have mothers, remember?” and it was supposed to be a joke, a callback to their usual banter, _ at least a bastard knows _ … but it came out wrong. _ Thanks, Tama, _ how many times had he heard that, in a past life. Qunari didn’t have mothers and the Bull’s men were not his little imekari. But his stomach hurt. 

Krem put a hand on his arm.

“We’ll be fine, Chief.”

The Bull put his own hand over Krem’s, squeezed it tight for a moment, then let it drop. Took a step back, put some distance between them. Felt like too much and not enough. “All right, Chargers. Horns up.”

“Horns up,” Krem repeated.

He’d be alright. Even if the Bull went down he’d be all right. It wouldn’t hit him the way that… He’d do better with it. 

The Bull’s team trudged along the hillsides, sliding through mud, and Dorian and Gatt, of course, couldn’t stop picking at each other. The Bull heartily wished the Inquisitor hadn’t brought Dorian along. It might have been worse, he supposed. They might have brought Cole. It would have been… hard, to explain the kid. Or Solas; the Bull could almost hear him trying to debate the Qun with Gatt. Gatt wouldn’t know how to handle it. For all his new, impressive serenity, he didn’t know how to handle any of them. That was clear when he tried to drop things with Dorian and turned to Sera. Her response made the Bull’s mouth quirk in a brief smile. 

When he thought about it, none of the inner circle would really get along with Gatt, and that itched at him. The two halves of his life, not lining up. 

The fighting was the fighting. They took down the expected group of Venatori. Were halfway surprised by the second group. The Bull expected to feel some relief at that. The hanging sword having fallen. But he was still uneasy. The thrill of blood and dismemberment quieted it some. Not enough. He nearly lost the eye he had left to a Venatori stalker, but the man’s throat opened up as Gatt materialized from nowhere. His fighting had improved too. “That’s what I’m talking about,” the Bull roared when all the bad guys were down, and he ruffled Gatt’s hair, just like he used to. Gatt didn’t sputter or hiss, just peered up at the Bull, eyes startled and face flushed but grinning, and at last the Bull was sure the boy he’d known was still in there.

Still, the breath didn’t pass easily through his lungs until he saw the Chargers’ flare go up, a bright streak of red in the gray blur. At this distance his boys were just dark dots, but Krem was there if he paid attention, the miles of rocky cliff not nearly enough to separate them. 

“I knew you gave them the easier job,” Gatt said, and from his expression the Bull knew he was letting all his relief show on his face, and that was probably a bad move. But he couldn’t in the moment bring himself to care. 

The second flare went up, and there was the dreadnaught, cutting through the choppy water, its iron-hulled darkness clearly visible even through the fog and rain. He couldn’t hear the cannons fire, but he could see the flash of power, and he imagined he could feel the vibration through the air. “That brings back memories,” he said, still feeling the smile on his face, because for once the memories weren’t unwelcome. Seeing those cannons fire meant shit had worked out okay, you’d done your job and now the cavalry was here, the might of the Qun about to crush the bastards who’d hurt you. He remembered one time, lying in mud and his own blood, hearing the sound of those cannons and feeling calm and relief wash over him. The knowledge that even if he died, the Qun would keep going, and that meant everything was okay. 

How long had it been, since he’d felt like that?

But that was the thing about Ben-Hassrath training. Even as his mind drifted, his eyes still watched, and they saw the movement on the beach. 

He heard himself say, “Crap.” Like that one word could mean anything. 

Credit where credit was due, his allies figured out the situation with impressive speed. The Bull listened to Dorian and Sera’s bilingual swearing, and watched the Inquisitor’s fingers tighten on their staff, and it was all just noise. He waited. He knew when Krem spotted the reinforcements. Felt the tension in muscles that weren’t his. No fear, no panic, not yet. 

“They can retreat,” the Inquisitor said, a long way off. 

Gatt said, “They need to hold that position.” 

“They hold that position,” the Bull said, “they’re dead.”

“They don’t,” Gatt said, implacable, “the dreadnought’s dead.” 

The calm on that small face looked different, now. Looked like hard cold inescapability. The Bull turned his head away from it. Looking for an exit that didn’t exist.

The rain was getting in the Bull’s eye. He blinked it away. Waited. Like he’d waited in the viddathlok, in his cell, the air damp and cool, the stone cold. Waiting to hear if he was bound for rock-breaking or if the Qun still required his mind, trying not to hope more for one outcome than the other. But there had been a comfort left to him, in that waiting. There had been the relief of submission to the Qun. 

There was no comfort here. 

“You’d be throwing away an alliance with the Qunari,” Gatt said, and there, at last, were fractures in the calm. Anger bleeding through. The old familiar anger. “You’d be declaring yourself Tal-Vashoth!” Gatt shouted, and that got the Bull turning back. Whatever was on his face now, it made Gatt flinch, just a little. Part of the Bull was glad of that. Part of the Bull wanted to do more than make him flinch.

But Gatt had never been intimidated by anything for long. His head jerked back up, and his eyes had fire in them. “Half the Ben-Hassrath think you’ve betrayed us already!” The Bull wanted him to shut up. The Bull wanted him to be quiet. The Bull wanted- “I stood up for you, Hissrad,” and the words were coming out all shaking, and the Bull knew that despite all the years, all the growth and maturity Gatt had gained, in this moment the Bull still had the power to completely fuck the kid up after all. He hadn’t asked for it. “I told them you would _ never _become Tal-Vashoth. No matter what was written on your skin, you’d never, not after what they did, not after they killed Va-” 

“Don’t,” the Bull said. There was a hand on his arm. The Inquisitor. The touch registered, but didn’t quite press through the fog, the vast distances. The hand dropped, after a moment. 

Gatt turned away, breathing heavily, and the Bull stood very still, but his heart pounded, keeping time with another’s, someone readying himself for battle. Crying out,

_ Horns up. _

The moments were sliding by, measured in human heartbeats, as Gatt fought himself for control and Dorian cursed again, very quietly, and the rain kept coming down relentless as the world.

Gatt pulled himself together. Stepped closer, like he was trying to close the big void that had opened up between the Bull and the rest of the world. He didn’t have the reach to put his hand on the leather that covered the Bull’s shoulder, covered the black dead mark, but he touched the leather strap that ran to it, and the Bull got the fucking message regardless. 

“They’re my men,” the Bull said. 

“I know. But you need to do what’s right, Hissrad. For this alliance, and for the Qun.”

The thing in Gatt’s voice and face that wasn’t his, that had been implacability, was back, but it had changed to pity, and that was worse.

“He’s my soulmate,” the Bull said. Wondered why he was using the Common word, why he was speaking in Common. Knew the answer as soon as he thought the question. He wasn’t talking to Gatt, not really. He was talking to the Inquisitor, who was a romantic, who might be moved by pity.

“I know,” Gatt said. “I’m sorry. But he’s just _ bas_, Hissrad.”

It was the wrong argument. Qunari were asked to give up their kadan for the greater good all the time. It was a common thread in the folk stories. Gatt could have appealed to that. Instead he was asking the Bull- Hissrad- to do the old thing.

The making-them-not-real thing. 

Not to enemies, though. Not even to civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. To the people he loved.

He looked at the Inquisitor. Knowing as he did it, exactly what it was he was doing. Maybe the Qun would forgive, depending on how this played out. But he’d always know. 

Looking at the boss, the distances changed. Now the whole world was just him and them, and everything else was somewhere else. He saw that they knew what he was doing, too. Not like they were judging him, or even like they were storing the information for future use. But in this moment they were seeing him, completely.

Maybe that was okay. Maybe it was even good.

“Call the retreat,” the Inquisitor said. 

“Don’t,” Gatt said, but the Bull could barely hear him. The Ariqun was a very long way away. The reeducators on Seheron were very far away. The boss was here.

He blew the horn.

Gatt’s face was a picture of rage, painted in the colors of childhood pain and adult bitterness._ I did it, _ the Bull thought, _ even after all this time I found a way to ruin him, the last one I thought had escaped me__._ The Bull looked at him, and didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said.

Gatt probably knew that too, but the hurt inside him still boiled up and out. “All these years, Hissrad,” he said, “and you throw away all that you are. For what? For them?” He gestured at Dorian. “For Tevinter _ bas_? For a _ magister_?” 

“His name,” the Inquisitor said, “is Iron Bull.”

“I suppose it is,” Gatt said, and then he walked past the Bull, and into the misty rain. 

Nine years, the Bull thought, nine years and he was still on a hill, in the rain, covered in blood, knowing only that he had come to the end of his purpose. But there had been a black mark on his skin then, the death of his heart and the death of a life so that he could be reborn. Now his heart was alive and so was he and there was no rebirth, only a path back down the hill that he walked without chains, without guards, without Gatt, without the Qun. 

  
  


It felt like too much was happening, too loudly. The rain howled against the canyon cliffs and hissed among the trees. The Inquisitor was watching him carefully from his left side, and on the Inquisitor’s other side Dorian and Sera were picking some kind of loud argument with each other to break the awkward silence. The Bull tried to focus on one foot in front of the other until they came around a curve in the path and there were the Chargers limping towards them, Krem in the lead all bloody and grim and_ alive, alive, alive. _

“We saw the dreadnought go down,” he said, reaching them. “Damn shame. You all right?” He was favoring his left leg.

The Bull stared at him.

“Chief?” Krem said, sounding slightly worried, and reached out to pat the Bull on the arm. The Bull felt the touch, the weight of Krem’s armored glove on his bare skin. 

“I’m good,” the Bull said. “What happened with that leg?”

“Lucky fireball,” Krem said. “Stitches says I’ll live.” There was a crease between his brows, and his olive eyes hadn’t left the Bull’s face. More quietly he said, “You sure you’re all right?” 

_ Never better, kadan_, the Bull almost said. He almost pulled Krem into an embrace. It would be awkward, his bare skin against the hard sharp edges of Krem’s armor. The pain would feel good, would cut through the buzzing in his ears.

“I’m good,” he said. 

“Impressive work with that first wave,” Dorian said, from somewhere in his blind spot. The Bull started. He hadn’t been paying attention. “I do love seeing my countrymen cut down so efficiently.” 

“Shame we didn’t have you to help with the second wave, altus,” Krem said, grinning. “Bet if you’d insulted their fashion sense they’d all have gotten embarrassed and gone home.”

The Bull, turning towards Dorian, got a look at both of them, both laughing, the late afternoon sun shining paradoxically through the sheeting rain, Dorian an elegant wet cat to Krem’s dripping mabari. 

_ People who’ll need your help, _Tama said.

Tama, your child is Tal-Vashoth. Tama, your child is dust. Tama, I’m sorry. 

_ We’re alive right now. Why shouldn’t we make the most of it? _

Gatt, seventeen, tiny and too young, always too young. Determination wrestling down fear, displayed on his too-open face. Pale in the rain. Hissrad, it’s all right. You killed them all. You can put the knife down, now. 

The Qun will take care of you.

They reached an Inquisition camp with an hour’s worth of light still in the sky, though it was only weak light, through the gray clouds. The rain had eased, however, and the camp had warm fires and enough tents for everyone. The Inquisitor disappeared into the largest tent to confer with the camp’s scouts and spies about local Venatori movements, and to write hasty reports back to Skyhold. The Chargers settled themselves in with the speed of practice, removing and cleaning armor, filling up their packs with supplies, and taking advantage of the time to do some small repairs. The Bull watched as Stitches cleaned and bandaged Krem’s leg. Krem rolled his trousers back down and said, “Why don’t we share a tent tonight?”

“That sounds good,” the Bull said. Rocky would have to share with Grim, but they’d done that just fine in the past. Mostly. 

He watched Krem help Dalish build up the fire. He watched him produce a flask and cups from his baggage and pour drinks for each of the Chargers, handing them a cup and an encouraging word about their performance in the battle. When Krem then picked up the flask and the remaining two cups and headed up the hill, to the most distant tent, the Bull followed.

There wasn’t much of a view at the top of the hill. The sight of the ocean was blocked by towering pines. At least that meant more privacy. 

Krem sat down on a boulder. “Sit down,” he told the Bull.

The Bull sat. 

He would have thrown himself off the cliff, if Krem had asked. He would have tried to walk to Par Vollen, or fly to the moons. 

“Here,” Krem said, offering the Bull a cup. The Bull took it. Their fingers brushed.

Krem cried out, his cup jerking out of his hand, wine spilling. The cry became a scream of pain as Krem toppled off of his makeshift chair. The Bull lunged to catch him, voice inside screaming _ careful be _ careful _ he’s not wearing his armor _ while another said, with frantic false calmness, _ this is your punishment, somehow. You were weak and he’ll pay for it, just like Vasaad. _

He caught Krem by the arms. Muscular arms, with a fair bit of padding too, but in the Bull’s hands they were like twigs. 

_You thought you could save him? You thought you could cheat this time?_

“My back,” Krem gasped. “Feels like it’s- on fire-”

“We need to get you to Stitches,” the Bull said. 

Krem shook his head. The Bull growled in frustration. Krem and Stitches got along fine, and Krem happily went to him for poultices and hangover remedies, but the few times Krem had taken a hit below the collarbone or above the knee, he’d asked the Bull to get him thoroughly drunk before the medic took a look. They didn’t have time for that now. 

He couldn’t feel it. Whatever was happening to Krem he couldn’t feel any of it, and he didn’t know if it was just that weird distance that had opened up between himself and everything since he’d seen the Venatori mages on the hill, or if it meant something else, something worse. 

“You take a look,” Krem grunted. “Tell Stitches what you see.”

“All right,” the Bull said, “but if he wants to look himself-”

Krem shuddered in the Bull’s grip, breaths coming in short pained gasps. “Fine,” he hissed. 

“You okay out here?” the Bull asked. “It’ll be dark inside the tent, and I don’t think anyone’s likely to see us up here.” 

Krem nodded. The Bull helped him peel off his padded, sweat-soaked shirt. Underneath Krem wore a linen undershirt. He didn’t bind on the days they fought, bulky armor and thick gambesons doing the work for him. The Bull didn’t know what he expected to see under the final layer of cloth. A poisoned wound, perhaps? Some evil magical shit?

Instead he saw gold. 

Over the white starburst of the ancient scar, the broad wavering letters were filling in with shimmering gold.

Once, in Qunandar, Hissrad had seen a tablet, inscribed by Ashkaari Koslun himself, which had at some point during the centuries of its existence fractured into five pieces, and was now held together by a tracery of metal. Krem’s back reminded him of that, now. 

Before he could stop himself, his fingertips brushed across the swirls of color.

And he felt-

_ -everything. _


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bull submits to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and receives the reward of being loved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to God next chapter will have makeouts.

Ashkaari couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard the word madness. It was just something that came into his world as an abstract concept, part of a pair of opposites. Chaos versus the Qun. Suffering versus the Qun. Madness versus the Qun. 

He remembered the first time he’d heard the term Tal-Vashoth. A children’s story, didactic, simple, designed to sink into the young mind and stick there. The sten who saw the corrupt cities of the _ bas_, and was corrupted by them, killing for anyone who gave him rich food and drink, until the madness twisted him so much he turned his sword upon his _ bas _patrons and was killed by them.

This was what madness meant, to the Iron Bull: 

A filthy cave in the hot jungle, easy to find by the marks of booby traps and the body of the innocent hunter who had come too close. Moon’s scarred face bereft of any of its dignity, nothing but animal fear as he lunged at Hissrad from the shadows of the cave.

A woman he’d worked beside for years, wreathed in flame in the town square, holding her partner off the ground with one hand, the thing riding her body laughing and laughing as the skin burned off his bones. 

Light piercing the rainclouds to glint off of Vasaad’s knife. Rain washing the blood from his neck, from Hissrad’s hands and face and chest. 

He’d watched for that, all these years. For violence, red haze and red blood and flames. He’d never prepared for this. His whole conception of himself broken apart and remade as part of something else. 

He was a child safe and warm in the sunny courtyard of the dormitory; but surely that was only a fantasy, and he was cold and hungry and miserable as a bigger boy pulled his hair and called him a bitch. He was a soldier laughing harder than he’d ever laughed before in his life, sitting with other men around a fire, stomach full and feet aching. No, he was only a spy pretending to be a soldier, the laugh calculated as he leaned forward to ask what the people sitting around the fire thought of the new kithshok sent over from Par Vollen. But the people were gone, the tavern empty, and in front of him was a giant, a gray-skinned, demonic monster covered in blood and gore, reaching out to him and saying something he didn’t understand. 

And then it wasn’t a monster, it was _ the Chief. _A grin, a wink, a slap on the back or a touch on the shoulder, all the things he’d craved from men his whole life. A horned head tilting from its great vantage point, _ what do you think, Krem? _Seeking his opinion on a strategy or a formation. A great deadly axe crashing into his shield, the Chief keeping up a constant flow of advice, observation, and recrimination as they trained, and not once a _ you’re tough for a little girl, _ not once _ I feel sorry for your future husband_. Not even the things he’d come to expect in the army, _ scared of messing up your baby face, pretty boy? _Or _stop sucking up to the officers, it won’t get you a promotion, not with that accent, not with your manners. Think you’re better than the rest of us, do you? _But the army was gone and there was only the Chargers, and the unending unconditional flow of acceptance and affection that seemed far too good to be true, but it was true, it had to be, it was validated by the very skin on his back. What he, amazingly, deserved, his destiny, the soulmate who made him feel like more than the Maker’s humorous mistake. And his fingers kept itching to reach for that eyepatch, shift it so he could see, underneath, his name, real, undeniable. 

He was on his knees in the mud, and his hands were empty.

“What just happened?” Krem asked, in a voice that croaked. The Bull managed to look up. Krem was still standing, facing the Bull now, clutching his scrunched-up shirt to his chest. Krem was standing up there. The Bull was kneeling down here. They were separate. And the Bull was himself again. And that was almost too much to bear. Himself was not a person he wanted to be. 

But if he’d been Krem, just for that mad, insane moment, then Krem had been- 

His body felt too big. Its old familiar aches were suddenly alien and strange. He pushed his eyepatch back, kneaded his eye sockets with his fists to soothe the pounding in his head.The Bull tried to speak. Failed. He worked up some saliva in his dry mouth, swallowed, tried again. “Is that normal?” His voice was a whisper. “For humans, when they touch?”

“Fuck me if I know,” Krem said. He sat down next to the Bull. Agonizingly close, but not touching. “I don’t actually- people don’t talk about this kind of thing. And the songs and stories are all poetical about it. Not very detailed when it comes to the nitty gritty.”

“Your back,” the Bull said. 

He heard Krem breathe out. “It got better when you groped me,” his lieutenant said. “Just stings a bit. Do you think it’s-”

The Bull told him what he had seen. The color, more like shining metal than tattooed skin.

There was silence for a moment, just the sound of the wind and a new scattering of rain. The world behind the shield of his hands was darkening. He couldn’t see Krem pulling on his shirt, but at the same time he could. 

“Something happened, didn’t it,” he said. 

“Yeah,” the Bull said. “There’s no alliance with the Qunari.” He closed his eye, seeking a darker black than the shadow of his hand. 

“Shit,” Krem said. “Because we lost the dreadnought?” The Bull felt righteous indignation, held in reserve, waiting to see if it was all right to complain about the boss’s bosses. And Krem’s strategist's mind, ticking back over the fight, backing up his conclusion that _ that’s not fair, there was no reasonable way for us to hold the objective- _

“It’s over,” the Bull said. “I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. I’m out.” 

He felt Krem’s thoughts stuttering to a halt. It hadn’t been like this before, had it? He’d known Vasaad so intimately, had been able to guess what he was thinking before his _ kadan _even knew it himself, but he hadn’t felt the thoughts like they were his own. “Over?” Krem said. “You mean- what do you mean by ‘over’?”

“No more reports,” the Bull said.

He heard Krem stand up again, take a few steps away and back. Not leaving, just aiding his thinking with motion. “This is- too much,” Krem said. “Let’s take this one half at a time.” Strategizing again. Doing what he’s good at, breaking a problem into pieces with his steady practical mind. Like the crackle of a fire in the tavern hearth, a comforting sound to lull the Bull to rest. 

“So,” Krem said, “you and me. Something changed. Andraste’s arse, did it hurt that much when I touched you, that first time?”

“I dunno,” the Bull said. “A lot of things were hurting, at the time. It all kind of blended.”

“You crazy idiot,” Krem said, and the fondness in it stabbed at the Bull’s heart. “You figure this thing with you and me didn’t really count all the way before, because Iron Bull wasn’t your Qunari name? And now those bastards are- what, cutting you off?”

_ Tal-Vashoth_, the Bull opened his mouth to say, but saying it would make it real. “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty sure.”

“So your Common name means more, now,” Krem said. “Like… maybe if we’d met before I really got used to being Cremisius, the same thing would have happened on my end. That make sense?”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. “Yeah, I think that’s exactly it.” Was Krem just a fucking genius? Or had the Bull’s own surmise jumped between them like a spark of static shock? 

He heard Krem swearing again, and it took him a moment to realize the words weren’t being said aloud. “I’m sorry, Chief,” Krem said. “If this is a lot for me to deal with, it’s got to be ten times as rough for you. I want to help, but if the best way for me to do that is get a camp’s length away from you until this thing with our bond calms down, I’ll head out now.”

His words trailed off towards the middle of his speech. The Bull guessed that was because he could very clearly see how the Bull was reacting to it. 

This was bad. This was such a huge pile of crap the Bull didn’t even know how to begin to deal with it. He didn’t want to; he didn’t want to deal with anything, right now. He wanted, like he’d wanted on the path, to pull Krem into his arms and feel both their hearts beating, but touch was now something to be avoided at all costs.

He was prepared for madness. He’d been prepared for fifteen years. But to be linked to Krem so closely that any madness in him would conquer them both- and even worse, horribly, was the concept of the link in general, the idea that someone might be able to see everything he kept hidden. Tamassrans did that, and reeducators, but he could kneel to them, give himself over with no thought reserved for their safety and well-being. That was not what he gave to Krem. 

“Screw that,” Krem said. “Quit worrying about me for one second. Let me worry about you for once. I’m fine.” And then his hand was on the Bull’s shoulder. 

_ You nearly died, _ the Bull didn’t say but he knew Krem heard it anyway. And knew Krem’s quick automatic denial- _ come on, Chief, we got out of there in plenty of time _\- was drowned before it could even breathe, under the tidal wave of the Bull’s delayed, demolishing grief. 

_ You nearly _ died _ nearly burned another black mark on my shoulder, would have stood there in the rain while it burned while you died _ feeling _ you die just standing there for the _ fucking _ Qun, if he knew would he hate me would you both turn from me as a betrayer, Hissrad, Liar, what’s left when the lies are gone, what’s left inside of me without you? _

Heard Krem’s confused thought,_ another- what other- _

_ If I knew- _

_ Chief wouldn’t have- _

_ No, I must be confused. He wouldn’t- _

_ The worst that could happen, _ the Bull told himself, _ is that he leaves. And that would be good. He’d be safe from you then. _

“I let the Boss make the call,” the Bull said. “Knew what I owed you, and I still couldn’t... Hissrad could have, so I guess he’s gone, but the Iron Bull might not be what you thought he was either.”

He forced himself to quiet stillness then, waiting to take the hits in whatever form they came, even though all he wanted to do right now was flee, wander down through the camp until he found an Inquisition soldier who’d be down to fuck or fight or play a hand of cards. But he forced himself to bring his hands down from his face, blink in the dim light, and turn to look Krem in the eye. Krem’s face was blank, and for a long horrible moment the Bull pondered a possibility he hadn’t even considered, before; that Krem might not just leave- he might challenge the Bull for the Chargers, if he thought the Bull didn’t deserve their loyalty. 

If he lost Krem and the Chargers both, the Bull wasn’t sure what he’d have left. No more useful tidbits of Ben-Hassrath intel for Red. He’d still make a decent bodyguard, he supposed, but the Boss’s advisors might well decide that an unstable Tal-Vashoth wasn’t worth the risk. 

What he’d have left was a mark he kept hidden under his eyepatch. 

It’d be worth it. 

He tried to imagine what he’d be doing right now, if the Inquisitor had chosen another way, and his mind shied away from it, like a galloping horse at the edge of an unexpected abyss. 

Krem sat down, at the edge of the fire. “Well,” he said. His tone was perfectly neutral, and it shouldn’t have mattered but the Bull couldn’t tell which part of the maelstrom inside was his feelings and which was Krem’s. “You never lied to me.”

The Bull wanted to disagree. Wanted to shout that he lied all the time, because part of him wanted the lie to be real, because being the Chief felt so easy, felt so good.

He said, “I can find a different tent tonight. Give you some time to think things over.”

“All right,” Krem said, looking at the ground. “But don’t-” He swallowed. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry about me,” the Bull said.

With each step he took the storm, the madness receded a little, and part of him wanted to turn and run right back, because the hollow emptiness was worse. He didn’t.

Going down the hill he passed by the others, Skinner and Rocky brawling in the mud over something, Dalish and Grim turning a roasting nug over a fire. They all turned to him as he passed, expecting him to break the fight up, tell them they were doing the cooking wrong. He stayed silent, let their campfire fade into the shadows at his back. 

At the bottom of the hill was the Inquisition camp, the twenty soldiers and three assistants the Commander insisted the Inquisitor travel with. And on the dark edge of the camp, the specialists. Dorian and Sera, shivering next to their own small fire. The Bull hoped they’d chosen a spot away from the big bonfire because of just a general feeling of exclusion, and not because someone had pushed them out. It was hard to imagine anyone pushing Sera or Dorian anywhere, but he knew how often it felt easier to just let things happen. 

“Oh,” Dorian said, as the Bull approached. “Iron Bull.” He put down the book he’d been apparently trying to read by firelight.

“Can’t sleep?” Sera asked. “Feel like shit over those Ben Harseholes? I got a bottle of the good stuff, if you want.”

The Bull reminded himself that Sera was his friend, that she was trying to help him. That quite possibly the burn of irritation in his chest was exactly what he needed right now. Sera generally knew what she was about. 

It didn’t change the fact that he didn’t want to be reminded that no one here knew a damn thing about the Qun. Or the Ben-Hassrath. Or him.

Dorian put a hand on Sera’s knee. She glared at him, and he looked back at her; she looked away, and sighed. 

“Maybe Inky’ll appreciate it,” she said, getting up. “Whatever. See you tomorrow.” But she gave him a final look before disappearing into the night, and he felt a twinge in his chest. 

“Sit down,” Dorian said. “You look like you’re about to fall over; it’s giving me a tension headache just looking at you.”

The Iron Bull sat. He watched the flames, for a while. Dorian didn’t speak. 

“Solas told me once that soulbonds are a kind of magic,” the Bull said, and sensed Dorian tensing up. 

“Technically, yes,” Dorian said neutrally.

“Can you… can they be broken, with magic? Or even just blocked?”

There was silence for a while, broken only by the crackling of the fire. It went on for long enough that the Bull pulled his scattered brain together and realized what he’d said and who he’d said it to.

“Yes,” Dorian said. “It’s blood magic, and considered in very bad taste even amongst maleficars, but it’s certainly possible. I won’t perform it. You’ll have to find someone else.”

“Dorian,” the Bull said, “I didn’t mean-”

“I suppose you’re only thinking practically,” Dorian said, the words tripping over each other as they left his tongue, “since we must work together, and there’s always the danger an ogre might pick me up during a fight and fling me into your vast expanse of uncovered chest-”

“Krem’s in my head,” the Bull said, “and I don’t want him to see the shit in there.”

The torrent of words stopped abruptly, like turning off a faucet.

At least the rain had stopped too, the Bull thought.

“I didn’t know,” Dorian said. “About you and Cremisius.”

“We don’t fuck,” the Bull said. “I guess that’s weird, for humans. It’s always worked for us. But I didn’t get my thoughts and feelings mixed up with his, before.”

“Really?” Dorian said. “I can’t decide whether I envy you or not. The confusion has always been a key element of the experience for me.”

That hit the Bull weird. Somehow he’d never thought to wonder, whether Dorian also might have more than one signature on his body. He didn’t know why it made a difference to him, but it did. 

“Does Cremisius also wish to be separated from you?” Dorian asked.

“I don’t know.” 

“Surely his wishes deserve some consideration.”

“I’ve done bad things,” the Bull said. It felt like someone else, speaking. “On Seheron. They seemed necessary at the time, but I know they were bad. Easy to blame the Qun for that, for putting me there. But I would have done worse, without the Qun. I wanted to. I wanted to hurt other folks the way my people had been hurt. Wanted to spread the pain around. But I knew I’d dishonor the Qun, if I did those things. It kept me sane. For all I know, I’m a danger without it, and you should put me down now.”

“No,” Dorian said. “You still have your conscience, Bull.”

The Bull looked into the fire. 

Was the dark churning panic in his mind his? Was it Krem’s, up on the hill? Could it have ever been like this with-

Blood and rain and no, no, not there, he didn’t want to be there any more. 

“If I lose it in a fight,” the Bull said, “go for my blind spot.”

“No need for that,” Dorian said. “A focused inferno spell should do.” 

The Bull turned his head. In the dark, only one side of Dorian’s face was illuminated by the flickering red light of the flames. Over the last five years, the Bull had gotten pretty good at guessing distances, so good that it almost felt automatic, but in this bad light, added to the way the Bull felt barely tethered to his own body right now, he wasn’t at all sure how far away Dorian was from him. It occurred to the Bull for the first time that he would never see Dorian with full vision. His dreams of Vasaad would always be more three dimensional. 

It also occurred to him that Dorian was beautiful.

The Bull swallowed.

Dorian waited, still. The Bull wasn’t used to this quiet patience from him. He wasn’t remotely prepared for it. 

“The Ben-Hassrath never told me anything about you,” the Bull said. He cleared his throat. “Just wanted you to know.”

“You had no orders to seduce me,” Dorian said. It would have been a lot- maybe not better, but easier to digest- if he’d sounded angry. If he’d been sharp and bitter and hurt. Instead he was very calm. “So you didn’t.”

“No,” the Bull said. “I mean- look, I’m not good at… making decisions based on what I want.”

“You have sex all the time,” Dorian said.

_ Nice of you to notice _ was on the tip of his tongue, but that wouldn’t help.

“That was just part of the cover. I could claim that, anyway. Or tell myself I was just doing what was easy. That it didn’t mean anything, either way. But this…” He gestured at his chest. 

“It was going to mean something.”

“Yes,” the Bull said. 

“Hmm,” Dorian said. “So there’s a little bit of romance in you somewhere, after all.” The corner of his painted mouth curled up in what was maybe a smile.

The Bull felt his heart judder. 

“If I lose it,” he said, “don’t let me hurt my boys.”

A sense of motion in the dark, abruptly aborted. Dorian’s hand reaching for him, and dropping. 

“You won’t,” Dorian said.

He knew what he would have done, if the Qun had demanded Dorian’s death instead of Krem’s. Making Dorian an un-person would have been. Not easy. But possible. He would have looked into Dorian’s face and chosen to see a _ Bas-Saarebas_. A magister, like the magisters on Seheron who burned children.

He looked into Dorian’s face now and he saw softness, and far too much trust. 

If Krem was- if he had- if things had gone the other way, what lie would he have told himself? That his men had died honorably, securing an objective, in defense of a better world. That they’d been more than just things. Just _ bas_.

If on Seheron the Qun had asked him to sacrifice Vasaad’s life-

Something changed. It was like he’d finally turned down a corridor in his head that he’d been avoiding all his life, and unlocked the door at the end with the key he’d had in his hand for years. And he knew that when he opened that unlocked door, he wouldn’t be able to shut it again.

He followed the thought. Opened the door. On Seheron, if he had been told, _ we must leak information to the enemy, and it must be believed; a sacrifice is required- _

And the answer was there, on the other side of that door.

All at once he could feel a presence on the other side of the fire. Knew with irrational certainty that if he turned his head he’d see a gray-skinned man in rope and leather, vitaar smudged, smiling at him wryly, a joke on the tip of that talkative tongue. For a moment, death and time were defeated, and the Bull could, if he wanted, turn and stand up and walk away from the fire, the man he loved slinging an arm around his shoulder and laughing, and the Bull might pick him up and spin him around, just for the joy of it, and Vasaad would lean down and-

He felt like crying. The tears didn’t come. They hadn’t in years. At some point that had been locked away somewhere inside him, during training or on Seheron or in the viddathlok, he couldn’t remember.

He didn’t turn, didn’t look behind him. He looked at Dorian. 

Don’t fuck this up, he told himself. Not this too.

After a while Dorian broke the eye contact, cleared his throat. “I’m hardly a paragon of stability myself,” he said. “I can’t imagine I have much to offer as- as a, a rock to lean upon.” 

“You don’t need to-” the Bull began, but he was stopped by a hand on his knee, pressure barely felt through the thick canvas fabric. 

“I find that I want to,” Dorian said. “So. Tell me how I can help.”

The Bull wanted too much. It was terrifying. 

“Talking would be nice,” he said.

“I do flatter myself that I am an adequate provider of conversation,” Dorian said. “Very well. What shall we talk about?”

“How about the Vivazzi Plaza again?” the Bull suggested. “I remember across from the place with the dancers, there was this guy selling these really tasty cakes- layers of dough filled with a kind of cheese and honey mixture-”

“Placinta cakes,” Dorian said, “I once ate so many I was sick in the Vivazzi Fountain. Though that might have been the wine.” 

The Bull settled himself in front of the fire, and tried to let the words take him away to somewhere far from the wet and the cold and the twisting in his gut. 

The fire was nearly out when the Bull heard footsteps behind him. He wanted to turn, then, but still couldn’t. Dorian’s quiet words died away. 

“Hey,” Krem said. And he moved, stepped from the darkness at the Bull’s back into the firelight. 

Cremisius Aclassi. Twenty-eight years old. Five feet seven inches tall, a hundred and eighty pounds out of his armor. Every angle of his face familiar, every scar on his body known to the Bull. A man with violence as his trade, because the world was made of violence and someone had to wield it, but the Bull had watched him sew toys for children with the gentle careful hands of a tailor’s son. One day the violence that kept Krem fed would kill him, and maybe the Bull would be there to see it. Maybe he wouldn’t. 

But tonight Krem was alive. Each breath he took was a victory. As sweet as any the Bull had ever bled for.

“Hi,” the Bull said. 

“I think this is my cue to disappear,” Dorian said. 

Krem made a negating gesture. A little burst of breeze made sparks fly up from the mostly-dead fire and dance around Krem’s silhouette. “Don’t make me the asshole kicking a man from his own campfire, altus,” he said. “Chief and I should be getting our asses to bed. Let’s go, old man.”

The seed of hope hurt, snaking roots into his heart.

“Okay,” the Bull said. His knees crackled, when he forced his legs to straighten. Krem watched, but didn’t reach out a hand for support as he might have the day before. 

“Good night,” Dorian said. He was fading into the dark without moving. “Please take care neither of you trips on something and breaks your head open on the way to your tent. I would miss you at breakfast.”

Krem gave Dorian a messy echo of a Tevinter military salute, and Dorian’s soft laugh echoed in the night air, as Krem and the Bull headed back across the camp.

It was quieter now, darker, most of the fires banked and the scouts sleeping. The Chargers’ tents were dark.Grim sat outside the larger one, huddled in a fur coat, because the Bull had taught them to stick to company guard watches even in a larger camp. Relying on people you didn’t personally know was a great way to get killed. 

Sounds from the trees, but they were only normal night noises. The Inquisition guard rotation would change in sixteen minutes. Krem’s breathing was calm as he walked by the Bull’s side, his steps slightly longer to accommodate the Bull’s stride, both of them automatically matching the speed they’d worked out over years of walking together. 

In the clearing before their tent Krem stopped. He turned. The moon shone reflected in his dark eyes.

He reached for the Bull, and the Bull went down on his creaking aching knees, so Krem’s hands were at the right height to grab the Bull’s horns and pull their heads close, let the Bull tilt his head down until their foreheads were pressed together.

The maelstrom was easier to navigate, this time. It was just thoughts, he knew that now. His body was his own, and no one was rifling through his memories. It was just his own mind, making associations, except Krem was being pulled along with him, and Krem was pulling him along, too, down the winding pathways of someone else’s life. 

But this time they didn’t wander, because Krem’s mind was focused, concentrated to a single point, and his fingers were digging into the Bull’s horns like he thought the idea would get through the Bull’s skull easier the harder their heads pressed together. 

_ You have a dead soulmark, and _ _I didn’t know. Thought it was just a tattoo, and I never asked. Didn’t recognize your language, because I never learned. You carry around someone you loved every day and for nine years I never bothered to find out about it. And now I feel it like it was me who loved him. _

Krem.

_ You told me you were a spy and I never bothered to find out what that meant, either, because I liked not knowing. So now I don’t get to complain, I think. _

Riding back to Skyhold with the Chief silent when he wasn’t snappish, the weight of whatever was bothering him distorting the bucolic landscape. He’ll tell me if I need to know. He always does. A man’s got a right to some private melancholy. Already bugged him enough about the altus. 

The grip on his horns relaxed, and warm human hands slid down his face, came to rest on his collarbone.

_ I didn’t want to think about you and your people. Didn’t want to think about the differences between you and me. And that maybe, one day… you’d go back. I was a coward. _

No.

_ Yeah. Sorry to burst any illusions you might have been carrying, but your soulmate’s not perfect. _

“Yes,” the Bull said, “he is,” and he turned his head, cautious of his horns, to rest against Krem’s hard shoulder, and let his hands pull Krem in close into a hug, and he felt himself starting to cry, for the first time in nine years.

“You chose us,” Krem said. “So what if it was hard. And now you’re out, and they’ll never ask you to make that choice again.”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. 

“Tell me,” Krem said. “Do you have any regrets, about how things turned out? Right now, would you change anything?”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. “Wish I’d told Gatt to fuck off the second he suggested leaving you to die.”

Saying it, something tight loosened in his chest. Because it was true. And nothing else mattered.

Later, lying in the warm dark of the tent, he heard Krem say, “I’m your soulmate, asshole. Know what that means?”

“What,” the Bull mumbled.

“Means I love all of you. Not just what you think I want to see of you.”

The Bull grunted. 

“I saw in your head. You’re always thinking about what people need from you. You ever think about what you might need from us?”

“Go to sleep,” the Bull said.

He waited for the dreams. Surely, tonight, they would come.

On some level he wanted them to. 

Which was bad, because he knew the dead were dead. It was important to focus on the living. 

Yet the longing to apologize, even to a memory, even to a ghost, was so deep, and so heavy. The need to say_ I was blind. I’m sorry. _

But that was what death was. The end of all second chances.

He slept, and didn’t dream. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A resolution, and a new beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much, dear readers, for sticking with me. I hope everyone is safe and healthy in this difficult time. <3 I've personally decided to escape into fanfiction, and so this is finally done, at least for now. Thank you to everyone who encouraged me with my very first longfic. You're all wonderful.
> 
> Because I am a dork, this fic now has cover art and a playlist, both of which can be found back in chapter one. I've also made a few very small edits to fix some timeline changes I decided on while I was writing this. 
> 
> Thanks again.

It rained again in the night. The Bull must have heard it in his sleep, because when he woke he had the deep sense of there having been rain, but the air outside the tent was clear, a gorgeous sunrise of glowing bands of clouds, the ocean stretching out forever in the distance, dotted by islands the Bull hadn’t even known were there. 

They packed up the camp. The Bull marveled at how normal everything was, the sounds of the boys good-naturedly arguing over chores, the smells of cooking and horses. Everything the same as always, except the clean after rain smell of the forest seemed sharper, and he kept getting distracted by light reflected in water droplets on pine needles, by the early morning sunrise glowing in the rocks, reflecting in Krem’s eyes as he glanced up at the clouds. 

“Should be clear til evening,” he said, thinking of marching in the shadow of the Hundred Pillars, the older soldiers commenting on the long lines of clouds dividing up the vastness of the sky. 

The Bull turned away from him, from the memory that wasn’t his, from the fear that his own eyes were a mirror, and Krem would see that every time the Bull blinked, it wasn’t Krem standing there, looking at the sky. 

“Hey,” Vasaad said- Krem said. “You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” the Bull said, but he turned away. He went up the hill. 

He could see the small dark shape of Lavellan, talking with the scout leader over on the other end of camp. Closer were Dorian and Sera, sitting on a tree stump, hunched over mugs of tea.

“Fasta vass, I hate mornings,” he could hear Dorian moaning.

“Shut up,” Sera groaned. 

Issallis and Mashev, sitting on a bollard on the pier, trying to make each other groan with bad Ben-Hassrath jokes. 

No. He closed his eye, opened it. Sera took a gulp of her tea, and then made a face at the heat of it. One plaid-covered leg swung back and forth, foot hitting the side of the stump in an irregular rhythm. There was no one like her in the whole of the Qun, and, the Bull thought, he was glad to be here, watching her squint at the sun. 

“Oh, hey Bull,” Sera said, noticing him. “How do you feel about mornings? Might as well make a poll of it.”

“Best time of the day,” he said, just to hear Dorian sputter.

Two day ride back to Skyhold. The scouts escorted them, switching out at each Inquisition outpost. There were a lot more of those than there used to be. 

The Inquisitor rode near the middle of the party. So did the Bull. Might as well take the bodyguard part of his job seriously, now that the intelligence resource part was kaput. 

Which… yeah, at some point, he needed to ask if he was still employed. 

“Hey,” Lavellan said. Their voice was the calm of the nervous who didn’t know how to make the act seem natural. 

“Hey, Boss,” the Bull said.

“So,” Lavellan said, “Dalish clans are usually between one and two hundred people. And most of the time, those are the only people who seem to exist in the world. We only see the other clans once every few years at the Arlathven, and we stay away from anyone else.”

“Right,” the Bull said. Waiting.

“As First to the Keeper, I knew every detail of everyone’s lives. They came to us for arbitration, for advice, for rash cream. I was pretty much part of everyone’s family.”

“Right,” the Bull said.

“I’m telling you this to provide context for why I’m about to ask something that might perhaps be inappropriate or, er, nosy, in cultures other than my own.”

The Bull grunted. “If you’re worried about it, Boss, you could just not ask me.”

“Are you and Cremisius being distracted by a soulmate bond?” Lavellan asked. 

The Bull gave them a look. They stared back, unabashed. 

“I noticed you keep looking at each other, and getting distracted,” Lavellan said. “But I’m confused, because I’ve seen you make physical contact before.”

“Is this really something you need to know?” the Bull asked.

“Not officially,” Lavellan assured him. “But I thought perhaps I could give you some advice, if it’s becoming dangerously distracting. I know a magical technique to block the feedback from a bond. Not completely, but enough to remove most of the distraction.”

The Bull blinked. “I gotta say, I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Unexpectedly, Lavellan flushed. “Solas taught me,” they said, succinctly. Tightly. 

Well, crap.

“Oh,” the Bull said. “Is it… blood magic? Dorian said-”

“No,” Lavellan said hurriedly. “I believe it to be as safe as any magic ever can be.”

“Okay,” the Bull said. “Let me think about it and get back to you.”

“Right,” Lavellan said, sounding relieved. “And, ah, let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you, all right?”

The Bull looked at them. They were so small, so unprepossessing when they weren’t wearing their fancy Inquisitor getup. 

Things weren’t going to be the same between them, after what had happened on the hill. But maybe that was okay. 

“You’ve done more than enough for me already, boss,” he said. 

They camped again that night, though there were towns and inns along the main road. The Inquisition preferred to keep the Inquisitor secure inside a guarded perimeter, avoiding the dangers of ambush in a town, which the Bull couldn’t help but approve of. It also meant he got to keep sleeping with Krem. The boys teased them about it, making the dirty jokes and insubordinate remarks he expected from them, but the commentary seemed to roll off of Krem like water on an oilskin. He didn’t put his bedroll down right next to the Bull’s, but he was close enough that when the Bull woke in the night from a dream of being chased through winding city streets, he was reassured by the pressure and scent of Krem’s breath, the small sounds as he shifted under his blanket. 

He had a feeling the dream wasn’t his. He’d been very small in the dream, and while Ashkaari had been to urban centers as a small child, he had no bad associations with those visits, certainly no memories of being chased or lost. 

But he didn’t say anything about it, in the morning. Krem didn’t say anything either. He helped Grim cook breakfast for everyone, and made the usual jokes about how burned Skinner liked her eggs. He tore Rocky a new one for not having his crap packed on time and holding up the group.

“Why are you laying into me?” Rocky grumbled. “That’s the Chief’s job. Did he hand you the stick up his ass?”

“Chief’s got a lot on his mind right now,” Krem said. “You leave him alone, all of you. I’m more than capable of cussing you out for your incompetence myself, you horrible little man.” 

Everyone avoided eye contact with the Bull for a while after that, which was okay. He watched the scenery go by from horseback and didn’t think about much of anything. 

Reaching Skyhold should have felt like a relief. It did feel like a relief, sort of. It also felt like a trap. Like as soon as he crossed the bridge it would all be real, no take backs.

Krem came up beside him as they walked through the gate, and touched him on the back. _It’ll be all right._

_Yeah. _

“Chargers, back to the barracks,” Krem said. “Drinks tonight at the Rest. We’ll do another post-op over beers.” That got a ragged cheer.

“Bring the barrel of Chasind Sack Mead,” the Bull said. That got a louder cheer.

“You coming, chief?” Krem asked the Bull, more quietly.

“I’ll catch up,” the Bull said. “Meet me in the yard at eleven. We should go over that shield move again.” 

“I’ll be there,” Krem said, and his happiness and relief pushed at the Bull’s mind. 

The Bull went to Josephine. Laid out what had happened. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. He could just tell it like a report, clinical facts. Whether he was Qunari or Tal-Vashoth didn’t mean anything to her, except insofar as it affected the Inquisition’s diplomatic dealings.

“I’ll let Leliana know immediately,” she said, a small frown on her lovely face. “No need for you to report it to her.”

“Thank fuck,” the Bull said in genuine relief, and Josephine laughed. 

“I am sorry you have been abandoned by your people,” Josephine said. “Please know that you will always have a home with the Inquisition.”

If the Inquisitor had tried to say that to him he’d have been pissed, but coming from Josephine it was all right. He didn’t need her to understand that he hadn’t been abandoned, that the Qun never abandoned a tool. He’d chosen to turn away. That was the weight he’d have to carry. 

Krem was in the kitchen with Grim and Stitches, watching Grim pry a knife blade under the cork of the mead barrel. 

The Bull didn’t mind at all, being able to know that, to know where Krem was, any time of the day. 

He headed out to the training yard. He kept an eye out as he walked along the dirt path, looking up at the battlements. The agents he knew about were already gone, looked like. Spotting the new ones would be an interesting challenge. 

He leaned against the stone wall, and watched people going about their business.

He saw Gatt, coming straight across the courtyard. It was something, maybe, that Gatt was letting him see his approach. If he’d wanted to just appear, the Bull knew he could have.

He was still so small. Just an elf, in battered nondescript armor. He should have stood out more, here in a world so different from Seheron, but no one was even giving him a second glance. 

He’d be doing undercover work now, for the Ben-Hassrath. Slipping into bas society, pretending to be one of them. 

The Bull wondered how long it would take for Gatt, to find his mask becoming reality. If it would take more or less than fourteen years. 

They didn’t say anything to each other. Gatt looked at him, like he was trying to find something, and failing.

When the Inquisitor arrived it was a relief. When Gatt spoke, even when he said _ Tal-Vashoth_, it was better than the silence.

“Enjoy your ‘vints,” Gatt said to him, at the end. “I hope it was worth it.”

_ Gatt, I’m sorry, _ he thought about saying.

Didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Lavellan said, when Gatt had gone. Gone for good this time, the Bull knew.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” the Bull said. He could sense Krem approaching. A sense of _ home _, growing closer.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Sorry, Chief,” Krem said. “Still sore from fighting off all those ‘vints.”

He had one gauntlet off, and he patted the Bull on the arm. _ Hey. _

_ Hey yourself. _

“I’ll let it slide,” he said. “This time.”

The post-op dissection session wasn’t one of his best. Whenever he tried to think too hard about the battle on the coast his head filled up with rain. After maybe twenty minutes of Rocky and Dalish arguing about optimal range he raised a hand and let it fall onto the tavern table. “I give up,” he said. “Enjoy your drinks.”

“Fuck yeah,” Skinner said in Orlesian, and downed her mug of mead.

“I’m tapping out,” Krem said. “Want to get an early night. You all enjoy yourselves, though.”

“We will,” Rocky said. “Right, chief?”

The Bull laughed, shook his head. “Nah, that’s enough for me too.”

They made disappointed noises at him, but he just smiled, and headed up the creaking stairs to his room. 

He almost tripped over Sera, who was sitting on the stairs, nursing a bottle of something undistinguishable. “Oh, hi,” she said, leaning back to stare up at him.

“Hi,” the Bull said.

“Listen,” she said. “Don’t feel bad about that shit that happened, all right? You’re better off with us. And we’re glad you’re here. Got it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I got it, Sera.”

“Right,” she said, and twisted away from him to look down over the edge of the stairs. “Reckon Dalish and Skinner’d be interested in trying out triangles?”

“Thought they’d be too elfy for you,” the Bull said, surprised.

Sera scrunched up her face. “They’re weird,” she said. “So am I. It’s all good, when it’s just a bit of fun.” She sighed. “Skinner’s got good tits.”

“Not… really,” the Bull heard himself say, before his brain started to shut down. 

“Okay, fine, not really,” Sera admitted. “But the way she licks that knife is hot.” 

“I’m leaving this conversation now,” the Bull said, stepping over her.

“Lot of help you are,” Sera shouted at his back.

His room was quiet, and very empty. He looked at it, at the desk with its precisely organized contents. 

The book from the Orlesian library was inside the desk. He picked it up. Locked the door carefully on his way back out. 

The doorway to the barracks was narrow. Way too much effort to try and get his head through.

“Hey,” the Bull said. Krem looked up. He was sitting on his cot, writing at a lap desk. Maybe an invoice for the fighting the boys had done this week. Maybe a brief letter to go to his mother with the monthly money. The Bull tried not to care too much, in case the caring summoned the knowledge into his mind. He felt, again, the uneasiness that came with simply not knowing the limits of their new bond. 

“Hey,” Krem said. 

“I’m going to go talk to Dorian,” the Bull said. 

“Oh,” Krem said, and he smiled, a little. “Good for you, Chief. And thanks for letting me know. I’ll make sure to be fast asleep by the next bell.”

“Hold on,” the Bull said, “he might not want anything to do with me.” 

“You’re not really stupid enough to think that,” Krem said. “Don’t pretend. But really. Good on you.”

“Thanks,” the Bull said. He felt like he wanted to do something else, but he didn’t know what, so he just stood there, awkwardly, until the muscles in his neck cramped and he had to straighten up.

“Knock him dead,” Krem called after him, softly, and the Bull didn’t need to stick his head back in to know that Krem was smiling.

The stars had come out, and the Bull watched them as he climbed the outside staircase up the main tower. The constellations were different, this far south, but by now they were familiar, even if they weren’t the ones he’d learned the names of in school. The cart. The wheel. The ship. There was a ship down here, too, but it was made of different stars. He’d heard that the Avaar saw different pictures in the sky. He’d be willing to bet they had a ship, too. 

He waited up on the battlements, in the cold under the stars, until he felt Krem slipping into sleep. Then he passed through one of the entryways into the tower, nodding to a night shift guard.

There was candlelight faintly visible under Dorian’s door. The Bull knocked. 

“Come in,” Dorian’s voice said, muffled by the heavy oak. “It’s unlocked.”

The Bull turned the handle, and went in.

He’d never been in Dorian’s room before. It looked like something colorful and expensive had exploded all over it, except the desk in one corner, which was almost as neat as the Bull’s. Everywhere else was covered with fabric and piles of books and rolls of parchment. The Bull had a weird moment of dizziness, of not quite knowing where he was. Hissrad had never seen a room like this, and never would.

Dorian said, “Close the door.”

The Bull obeyed. It made a soft noise as the latch clicked into place. 

There was a large bed in the middle of the room, with what looked like very expensive sheets. Dorian took a few steps over to it, moved the stacked books on it, and sat down on the end farthest from the door, and from the Bull. 

"I brought something for you," the Bull said, and Dorian looked at him, open and curious, and wasn't that a sight to see.

The Bull stepped further into the room, but stopped a few feet from the bed. He handed Dorian the book. As Dorian took it, their fingers came close to each other, but never quite touched. The Bull took a step back. Watched Dorian's fingers trail across the cover. Watched him gently opening the book and touching the pages, and tried not to feel too much like a wanderer in the desert, staring at an oasis. 

"Thank you," Dorian said, putting the book down at last. "This is very thoughtful."

"It's not a big deal," the Bull said. "I just saw it and I thought of you."

"That's very flattering." Dorian's mouth quirked in something that might have been a smile. "Sit down. I probably still have an unopened bottle of something around here, if you're thirsty."

"That's ok," the Bull said. "I was thinking. Could we talk?"

Dorian's gaze slipped away from the Bull's face, but he nodded. "That does seem wise. But let's make it interesting. Shall we do a round of show and tell?"

The Bull watched him pull loose the laces on his shirt, and shrug out of the fabric. The exposed skin underneath was slightly paler, very smooth, hairless. 

He could see the familiar trail of numbers. Square boxes with their collections of dots inside. Like a bad tattoo, done in a gray ink that was so close in value to Dorian’s skin tone that it was barely visible. 

It was in the same place as his. What did that mean? Was it possible this thing could have the same meaning for both of them? Was it possible anything could have the same meaning for both of them? 

Dorian stretched out his right arm, and started undoing the straps on his gauntlet. The Bull opened his mouth. “You don’t have to show me- you don’t have to show me anything,” he said, awkward, uncertain. 

“Sit down,” Dorian said, sliding the gauntlet off. 

The Bull sat down on the closer end of the bed. It dipped and creaked under his weight.

Dorian turned his bare arm so the inner side faced up. The Bull could see the long elegant lines of a Tevinter name. _ Rilienus Agorian. _The letters were as pale as the numbers that curved across Dorian’s ribs. There was a long white scar running down the center of them. The Bull, who was quite familiar with scars, could tell that the cut which had formed it had not been deep. Intentional scarring, maybe. 

“My parents kept us apart as children,” Dorian said. “They suspected, I suppose. Intellectual soulmates of the spirit are supposed to be a perfectly ordinary, respectable thing in my homeland, but like so many things, in practice it’s… well. I met him on his wedding day. I think we’ve most likely both changed so much as people since then that it wouldn’t even… I don’t mope about it.”

“That’s rough,” the Bull said, because he had to say something. “Thanks for telling me. I get what you’re saying.” There was a hollow feeling in his stomach, but he’d come here trying not to expect anything.

“Do you?” Dorian said, with a faint laugh. “How incredible. I myself have no idea.” He turned his head away from the Bull, and at first the Bull thought he was feeling awkward, and then Dorian said, “Look. Here.” His hand was on the back of his neck, and then it moved, and the Bull saw the black mark marring the tan skin. And then he saw that though its edges looked twisted and charred, more like a burn mark than anything, it was still, legibly, a name.

_ Gereon Alexius. _

The Bull heard himself breathe in, and then out. 

“It’s quite all right, you don’t have to say anything,” Dorian said, each word horribly bitter. “I know what it looks like.”

“What happened?” the Bull asked.

“I told you back on the coast, there are ways to sever a bond. I suppose he couldn’t risk me picking up on any of his plans. Or Corypheus couldn’t. I haven’t asked which it was.”

“Oh,” the Bull said, feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. “I’m sorry, Dorian.” 

“Don’t be,” Dorian said. “I didn’t even feel it when he did it.” He paused to take a deep breath and let it out again. “I’d gotten very good at ignoring my connection with him. When his wife died, it was just... too much for me. I ran away. It’s actually been almost exactly a year since I left his house.”

“Were you and he, you know, together?” the Bull asked, intensely aware of his own awkwardness. What kind of question was that? _ You shared a bond which allowed you to access each others’ deepest feelings and memories, but did you fuck? _ But that wasn’t what he was asking, was it? Not really.

Dorian shook his head. “I have wondered, sometimes… he had the appropriate proclivities. I told you I wasn’t wearing much when he met me. He found me in a brothel we both happened to be patronizing. Catered to very specific tastes. He did love his wife very much, you know. I suppose he was a better Tevene than me. Completely capable of separating his base physical desires from his higher affections. It was through seeing him with Livia, though, that I realized I couldn’t do what they did.”

“You’re a brave man,” the Bull said.

Dorian shook his head in negation. “No,” he said. “A brave man wouldn’t have abandoned the only people who’d ever given him a home.” He looked up at the Bull. “A brave man wouldn’t have run away from you, simply because you couldn’t give me exactly what I wanted.”

“Was that why?”

Dorian broke eye contact again, looking down at his hands in his lap. He laughed, very quietly. “After I met Rilienus, I thought… that’s it, for me. My other names were a respected older magister who’d never made any effort to seek me out, and something barbaric and unreadable. It’s hard enough to find someone willing to give random chance a try when you don’t have my specific preferences. I told myself that was fine. I would just enjoy whatever I could get. Then when Alexius told me about the numbers, I thought perhaps-” The Bull watched him consciously cut himself off. “It doesn’t matter. I just- I wasn’t prepared for you to be _ real_. A flesh and blood person, a good person, sometimes even an entertaining person, whose company I- find myself enjoying, but who does not, cannot give me more than a friendship I would resent. And I know that would not be fair to either of us.”

“You think I’m funny?” the Bull said. His face felt like it wanted to smile, and that was the wrong reaction, he knew, Dorian was upset, but something inside the Bull’s chest felt like a flickering fire, small but warm. 

That got Dorian to look up, if only to roll his eyes. “_ Sometimes_, I said.”

“Hey,” the Iron Bull said. “Look at me.”

He slid the eyepatch up, the worn leather smooth and familiar against his skin, and tilted his head to slide it over one horn. There wasn’t much of a change, visually. He knew if he closed his working eye, he could sense a slight change in the darkness of the ruined one, with the patch on and off, but with his right eye open it wasn’t noticeable. 

He slid off his harness. He’d left off the vitaar today, but the syllabograms on his shoulder still blended in with the curling black lines of his tattoos, he knew. 

He tapped the black mark on his shoulder. “This bit right here, this isn’t a tattoo,” he said. “It’s a name, it’s, uh, it says-” He stopped. His throat had closed. He could feel air rushing in and out of his nose. His view of Dorian’s face was starting to blur a bit. “Crap,” he said, quietly.

Dorian said, “You don’t have to tell me.” As the silence stretched longer, “Really, you don’t. There’ve been more than enough embarrassing confessions today already, perhaps we should save some for later.”

“It says Vasaad,” the Bull said, and it was like lancing a wound. Like he’d been stabbed, and now ugly gunk was leaking out. The syllables sat in his mouth. He hadn’t said them aloud for fourteen years. 

For twice as long as he’d even known Vasaad. 

“His name was Vasaad,” the Bull said. _ He was smaller than me. Not as recognizable. He’d be a sailor one day, a bricklayer the next. He was good at hearing things, and picking up things that were left around. When I met him he wanted to make the world laugh. By the time I killed him he just wanted to make it scream. _

The Bull said, “He was Qunari. I knew him on Seheron.” 

“You lost him,” Dorian said. “I’m sorry.”

The Bull sighed. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “I think I need to tell someone, and I think it might help us both, if I tell you. But I’m not sure about it.” 

“I’m listening,” Dorian said. He leaned back, against the headboard. “I’m a wonderful listener.” 

The Bull said, “A lot of you, you… non Qunari… you think there’s no love, under the Qun. That’s not true. We love just as much as anyone. But it’s different. You can’t decide you only want to have sex with this one person, because you’re not the one who decides that. You don’t find someone to raise kids with, because you’re not the one who raises kids. You can’t pick one person you want to spend your life with, because what if the Qun needs you to go somewhere else? I never knew anything different. How would a fish know about fire? But I think maybe if he and I were born Vashoth, we’d have… you know. It would have been different.” 

“You were in love with him,” Dorian said. 

Maybe. 

Maybe there was a world where two Qunari met, not as secret police but as a farmer working in the fields, and a messenger passing by. As two tamassrans, sitting together on the porch of a school, sipping tea and discussing their students, their legs touching under the table. 

But they wouldn’t have. The names on their bodies were the names of their jobs. Their fates. 

But it was nice to imagine, just for a moment. 

Two Vashoth, raised never knowing the Qun. Meeting. Growing old together. Wrinkles creasing the corners of his _ kadan_’s eyes. Laugh lines. Long nimble fingers tangled with his. 

The Bull said. “I could have gone my whole life without knowing I was missing something, and maybe I would have been happy. But now I know it’s out there and I just-” 

He wiped the tears from his eyes, the good one and the busted one both wet. Then he tried to say something else and discovered that he couldn’t. _ Very smooth, chief_, he could imagine Krem saying.

He sensed movement, and blinked. Dorian had leaned forward. He was looking at the Bull, hesitating. The Bull looked back at him.

“I’m just trying to say,” the Bull mumbled, “that I don’t know if I can be what you want, but I’d like to try.” 

“This may be a terrible mistake,” Dorian said. 

The Bull nodded. 

“I can’t think of a mistake I’d rather make,” Dorian said.

Very gently, very lightly, he took the Bull’s face in his hands and kissed him. 

It didn’t happen fast, but somehow, there wasn’t time for him to tense against pain which never came. He felt, at first, a slow, soft warmth, spreading from Dorian’s lips, the tips of his fingers, through the places where their skin touched, through his face and then into his skull where it bloomed into an impression of golden light. As though he’d been sitting in the dark, and all at once a curtain had fallen, and sunlight had poured in through a window from a bright garden.

_ Ashkaari. What are you doing out here? You can’t have finished painting the wall already. _

Purple flowers. This one is poison. This one heals. Small brown fingers, trailing against velvet soft petals. Crouching down behind a cluster of violet as the tutor runs past, calling frantically. 

There was a garden in the training center, in Qunandar. A small patch of color, fed by a square of sunlight. Hissrad went there in the early mornings. In the center of the training complex, you couldn’t hear the sounds of the city outside. The garden was tended by a woman in the brown robes of the agricultural workers. Sometimes she sat too, and meditated with Hissrad, both of them listening to the drip of water onto petals and leaves. 

Gardens looked different by moonlight, all the colors turned to rich shades of black, a soft bed to catch Dorian when he tumbled down behind a stone wall, someone else’s hands in his hair, knees bracketing his waist, breath giggling into his ear. 

Vasaad, a crown of tropical flowers falling over one eye, smiling at Hissrad as the children tried to pull a garland over one of Hissrad’s horns. 

Dorian, playing chess in Skyhold’s gardens, turning to make a comment to Cullen about the chill and catching sight of familiar horns. Watching the Bull laboriously crouch down to get a closer look at a small pink flower. Something warm and tender in his chest. 

The contact ended, but the Bull didn’t feel bereft, as Dorian leaned back. The light was still inside him, spreading out down into his lungs. “Didn’t know you saw that,” he said. 

Dorian reached out a hand, and his elegant fingers brushed the Bull’s chest, the violet flowing into the gray lines like vivid ink into a channel. “Now I almost wish it was pink,” he said.

“Nah,” the Bull said. “Purple’s good. Feels like you.” 

“Hah,” Dorian said. His other hand traced the numbers on his own chest. “What color is it?” he said, looking up at the Bull’s face. 

“Gray blue,” the Bull said. “Not very cool.” 

“Like a storm,” Dorian said. “That seems appropriate.” His voice was very breathy.

The Bull kissed him again. He could feel his heart thudding, under Dorian’s fingers. He reached up, put one hand on Dorian’s neck, curling around that blackened mark; put the other over Dorian’s heart, felt it beating under his palm. 

It was a while after that before he felt like a separate person again. The bed felt very comfortable. He decided to lie on it for a while, feeling the draft from the darkened window that made the candles flicker, letting all the bits of himself come back to him at their own pace. Dorian stood, and turned to the tall mirror leaning against one wall. The Bull watched him summon a ball of glowing luminescence, and peer into the mirror. 

“This design,” he said, “it’s… not ugly.” 

“I’m sorry,” the Bull said. “That it caused you anxiety.”

“Don’t be,” Dorian said. “It’s… not always a bad thing, to be marked as different.” He paused. “It looks different from the one on your shoulder. Is it rude of me, to enquire about that?”

The Bull bent his arm, touched his shoulder. “This one’s a role. That one’s a number. I actually never heard of someone having just a number on them, but I think I get it now.”

Dorian, shrugging out of his trousers and into a satin robe, turned to look at him, raised an eyebrow.

_ Tama, how will I serve the Qun? _

_ How will I be who they need me to be? _

_ You’ll be yourself, little Ashkaari, and that will be exactly what they will need. _

Vasaad needed Hissrad, and he tried to make himself into that, but in the end he hadn’t been a good enough liar. Or maybe he hadn’t told the right lies. Or he'd lied to the wrong people.

Krem needed the Iron Bull. He’d managed to get there, eventually. When it mattered.

Dorian needed someone without a mask. Without a role. Broken and put back together again. Stumbling in the dark, looking for the light. 

So did _ two seven one zero five three six. _

“Oh,” Dorian said. “I see.”

He sat down on the bed again. Leaned his shoulders against the Bull’s. 

“Are we going to be inside each others’ heads all the time?” the Bull asked. “Told you before, it’s not fun inside here.”

“It’s not exactly roses and daffodils inside my skull, either, believe me,” Dorian said. “I find myself oddly unintimidated by the prospect. We’ll deal with it. If the world doesn’t end before we get the chance.” His hand slid down to rest on top of the Bull’s. A small, delicate hand, like Ashkaari had imagined, but with strength and grace he couldn’t have guessed. 

“I’ve been alone for quite a while,” Dorian said. “It would be nice to not be.”

The Bull turned his palm over. Wrapped his three fingers around Dorian’s five. “Yeah,” he said, and knew that Dorian understood exactly what he meant. 

  
  
  



End file.
